.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVLRSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 

 
 f. 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN ADDINGTON ! SYMONDS 
 
 flvai <t>a<ri 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDEE, & CO., 15 WATEELOO PLACE 
 1907 
 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 TO 
 
 fifties flDaraot Pennant 
 
 IN MEMORY 
 OF LONG DARK WINTER NIGHTS 
 
 AT DAVOS 
 
 MADE LUMINOUS 
 
 BY WITTY CONVERSATION.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE THIED EDITION 
 
 ' ESSAYS Speculative and Suggestive ' has long been out of 
 print. For a copy of the first edition, issued by Messrs. 
 Chapman & Hall, in 1890, I had to pay 4. 12s., while 
 a copy of the second edition, also by Messrs. Chapman & 
 Hall, 1893, could not be found anywhere, though an order 
 has been for some years in the hands of several well-known 
 booksellers. The fact that those who had bought this book 
 treasured it would have pleased Symonds in no small degree, 
 for the passages I shall presently quote from his corre- 
 spondence show that he set much store by this piece of 
 work, had taken great pains over it, and was deeply hurt 
 by the cold reception it received at the hands of the press. 
 
 ' Essays Speculative and Suggestive ' appeared in June 
 1890, and Symonds died in April 1893. Though it was to 
 be followed by 'Our Life in the Swiss Highlands,' 'The 
 Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti,' and 'Walt Whitman,' it 
 is to be considered among the author's later works, both in 
 thought and style. Later, not matured, for ill-health retarded 
 and death cut short the full development of his powers of mind 
 and of pen, and those who knew him best felt that he was 
 still in ' werden,' in process, when the end came. Symonds 
 himself was aware of the change in style which is manifest 
 in these Essays. Writing half in jest, on February 16, 1889, 
 when he had just begun the shaping of his book, after finishing
 
 Vlll PREFACE 
 
 the ' Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi,' which never interested 
 him, he says : ' If I dare talk of manners, these Essays are 
 certainly in my fourth manner, and will be simply atrocious 
 when they appear in print. I don't know what devil has got 
 possession of my own style and dried its wells up.' The 
 devil, I think, was boredom with Gozzi, ill-health, the 
 beginning of fresh lung trouble, and overwork in an over- 
 stimulating atmosphere. All through the correspondence he 
 shows an unwonted anxiety and nervousness about the book. 
 He felt that he was striking out a new line. For though 
 in the ' Introduction to a Study of Dante,' in ' Studies in 
 the Greek Poets,' in 'Animi Figura,' and in 'Vagabunduli 
 Libellus ' there are to be found both speculation and sugges- 
 tion, he had not hitherto attempted to bring before his 
 public the reasoned grounds of his faiths both moral and 
 aesthetic. The Preface to the first edition, and many passages 
 throughout the Essays, indicate his position, and show how 
 tentative he considered his attitude to be. ' To suggest ideas, 
 to stimulate reflection, is the object of a book like this.' The 
 criticism that it evoked, the care with which it has been 
 treasured, the keenness with which it is sought, prove that it 
 has done both. 
 
 In the spring of 1889 Symonds made a journey to Italy, 
 and in crossing the Fluela Pass, on April 12, one of the post 
 sledges met with an accident ; Symonds, running back to 
 render assistance, slipped on the frozen road and experienced 
 a nasty fall, which shook him more than he was at first 
 aware of. By June he was back again at Davos, and ' Am 
 rewriting Essays: am now doing the one on "Landscape." 
 I think it has some good writing in it. But the book will be 
 an odd collection.' Soon after this, when rushing upstairs 
 with his usual impetuosity, he sprained his right foot very 
 badly. ' The enforced quiet,' he writes on July 20, ' has 
 made me go ahead with my Essays. I have rewritten one 
 on " Style," which is a book in itself ; one on the " Principles 
 of Criticism," and one on "Landscape" : all of them tough 
 subjects with a good deal of cerebration in them of one sort 
 or another. I find rewriting always more laborious than
 
 PREFACE IX 
 
 writing. One does it in cold blood, and has to be upon one's 
 guard lest the precision of the thought should be blurred in 
 the attempt to improve expression.' On July 24 he writes : 
 ' I have just been setting the finishing touches to my " Essays 
 
 Speculative and Suggestive," which, by the way, Mrs. G 
 
 says "is a very good title for a book, though it hisses like a 
 serpent, or our own family name." To be elated ... at such 
 a moment of (momentary, not permanent) delivery from a 
 load is peradventure pardonable.' The printing of the book 
 began when Symonds returned to Davos in November after 
 a visit to England. ' I find it not very easy to settle down 
 again to literary work after all that intellectual and social 
 racket in England.' 'The longer I live, the more trouble 
 proofs give me.' 
 
 In January 1890 Symonds had a sharp attack of influenza 
 always a serious menace to him in the permanent condition 
 of his lungs but he fought through it. On January 21 he 
 writes : ' My head, too, which suffered severely from the 
 influenza, is recovering a normal tone. Unfortunately, to 
 balance these benefits, I sprained my ankle again the other 
 day. I have cut thirty-four noble pine trees in my wood upon 
 the Seehorn, and I went to choose which I would keep for 
 planks and which I would saw up for fire-wood. Scrambling 
 about upon the huge smooth stems coated with smooth snow 
 and ice, I slipped, and have been three days lame, with arnica 
 bandages on to keep swelling down. 
 
 ' The beauty of the scene in the wood, the purity of the 
 air, the perfect stillness, the flooding sunlight, the solemn 
 giants all around, and the men at work athletically hauling 
 those unmanageable boles down chasms and ravines all this 
 was almost worth a sprain ! I have had no proofs of either 
 of my books (" An Introduction to the Study of Dante," new 
 edition, and the Essays). When I look at the proofs of the 
 Essays already here, I am almost glad that no more come. 
 This is in many ways the most important book I have written 
 for publication,' and he was not satisfied with the way the 
 work was being produced. ' You will agree that my trials 
 on the path of publication (regarding a book I set very great
 
 X PKEFACE 
 
 store on) are enough to provoke a saint : I go back to the 
 fourteenth century in Graubiinden when I am vexed ' 
 referring to his preliminary studies in the mediaeval history 
 of the canton which he proposed to write. The revises of 
 the Essays were passed ' for press ' in March, and in June 
 the book appeared. On June 19 (' 1.30 at night ') he writes : 
 ' I have to-night received a copy of my Essays. ... I am 
 glad it is out. It is a weight off my mind. And the book 
 has so much stuff of myself in it that I am rather glad it 
 goes forth to the world in forma pauperis. ... It is off my 
 mind : and even though one has sent some twenty-nine 
 volumes out, one is always glad when the last has flown. 
 I think this feeling of impatience about the rupture of the 
 umbilical cord of authorship grows more intense the more 
 one publishes.' On July 15 he reiterates his interest in 
 the book. ' I am interested in this book more than I have 
 been in any other : not in its success that must take care 
 of itself, and really does not matter but in what people 
 think of it ; for I put a great deal of myself into it, and 
 what they think of it is what they think of me, the man 
 here. I hope you will, sometime, tell me where you find me 
 "flinging out " in a way you do not like. I thought I had only 
 indulged in one fling ... in the Essay on Democratic Art. 
 But it seems I must already have done so in the first four 
 Essays. I want much to be enlightened on the subject. For 
 my aim at present in writing is not to fling out, except when 
 the occasion makes it necessary. And yet I know that, 
 living so much alone, I am not always in proper rapport to 
 my audience, and probably take many for accepted truths, 
 which may appear to others sallies of my own humour.' 
 Again, on July 29, he writes : ' You make me feel that the 
 long discipline I gave myself in preparing that book 
 altering my nature, correcting my proclivities, working 
 towards a conscious aim, has not been thrown away . . . 
 For I have lived a strange, anxious life in many ways of 
 late ; and all the time I have striven to gain precise views and 
 methods of expression. I have wanted to be as sincere in sense 
 and in thought, in the indulgence of natural proclivities and
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 sympathies, and in the training of the intellectual and moral part 
 of me, as I could hope to be. ... Who can judge for himself ? 
 We must see ourselves in the mirror of others, not in the 
 mirror of the reviews. They have their place in forming the 
 jury, which condemns or acquits the inner man. But they 
 do not enable one so narrowly to test the decline or the growth 
 in himself, as what a friend, who knows and loves him, says. 
 Henry Sidgwick here has helped me in the same way or a 
 similar. These Essays have suggested for twelve days con- 
 stantly recurring conversations, and have set speculation on 
 the wing. They would not have done so with him had they 
 not had stuff, and do you know I was beginning to fear I had no 
 stuff left in me. So through my friends I feel that, if I am 
 allowed some years of energy, I may go on to new things with 
 freshly trained faculties.' There is a long and interesting 
 letter addressed to Messrs. Holt & Co., of New York, dated 
 August 7. Whether the letter was ever sent I do not know. 
 In the course of it Symonds says : 
 
 ' I wish to explain to you a scheme which has been suggested 
 to me by a distinguished American painter (Mr. Richards) 
 of the Munich school, well-known in Europe, and also in the 
 United States. He thinks that the Essays in this book upon the 
 principles of art are original, sensible, and convincing enough 
 to deserve separate publication with illustrations. 
 
 ' What I have attempted to demonstrate in these Essays 
 is that the personality of the artist inevitably makes itself 
 felt in any attempt to imitate nature, and that this fact 
 renders a thorough realism in art impossible, while it forces 
 idealism of one sort or another on the artist's work. 
 
 ' Now, to prove this, we propose to offer a prize for the best 
 studies from the same nude figure to be competed for in the 
 famous Ecole Julien, at Paris. When the best studies have 
 been selected by impartial judges, we propose to photograph 
 the model in the several attitudes copied by the students, and 
 then to reproduce both the photograph of the model and the 
 studies of the successful draughtsmen by a mechanical process 
 of first-rate excellence invented by Herr Obernetter, of 
 Munich.' The scheme, however, was never carried through.
 
 Xll PREFACE 
 
 When the reviews began to appear they were not favour- 
 able, and the reception accorded to the book hurt Symonds 
 more than he was ever hurt before or after. Writing on 
 September 1, he says : ' The review of my Essays .in the 
 Athenaum (last number) please read if you can. . . . This is 
 the kind of review which makes one wish to publish nothing 
 again, which blights any pleasure one may have had in one's 
 work, and which puts truths about one's self (apparent as 
 soon as expressed) in a way to dishearten. It does not 
 matter after all. The day's headache has begun, and I must 
 stop. That is worse than the " privy nip." ' But his fine 
 courage and generous spirit could not be kept for long under 
 depression. Only six days later he writes : ' I wrote in a 
 night-marish mood to you about an article in the Athenceum 
 on my Essays. I see now that there is a great deal of truth 
 in what the reviewer said. He has spoiled that book for me 
 for ever. But I admit that he had the right to spoil my 
 conceit of it, because he has shown me that my conceit was 
 ill-founded ' ; and, again, the next day : ' You will see that I 
 have taken the Athenaum in good part. ... It is over now, 
 however ; and I am already the better for feeling humbled.' 
 Still, the reception of the book was a bitter disappointment 
 to Symonds, heightened, no doubt, by the continuous fever. 
 ' The days in this fever-prison go so sadly, and the nights so 
 strangely, that I am losing count of time ; Euedi [his 
 doctor] holds that the principal irritation is a recrudescence 
 of the old wound in my lung.' But the spiritual reaction 
 inevitable with a man of Symonds' vigorous spiritual fibre 
 soon made itself felt. On October 18 he writes to Henry 
 Sidgwick, ' I have overlived my interest in those two volumes 
 of Essays, and do not care what the Press says. I think I 
 made a mistake in supposing I could do things of that sort 
 well, and that I could acquire distinction by pruning off my 
 personal proclivities towards certain kinds of rhetoric. . . . 
 What do books matter in relation to the soul, when 
 life is trembling in the balance, and the days and nights 
 have no savour in them? Even so, I have love still, and 
 am yours.' It is characteristic of Symonds that a month
 
 PREFACE xiii 
 
 later, in November, he was seriously turning his atten- 
 tion to another large piece of work the Life of Michel- 
 angelo. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the reception of ' Essays Speculative 
 and Suggestive ' was not on the whole so chilling as Symonds 
 imagined when under the depression of the earlier reviews. 
 In private the book produced a marked effect on readers 
 competent to judge, and Symonds received a large number 
 of letters on the subjects he had discussed. Since his death 
 letters have reached me from Australia and America which 
 clearly show that Symonds had touched a very wide and 
 various circle of readers. A second edition was issued in 
 London just before Symonds' death, and from that edition, 
 which had the benefit of his revision, the present edition is 
 reprinted. 
 
 HORATIO F. BEOWN. 
 
 Ca' Torresella, Venice. 
 April 1907.
 
 AUTHOE'S PREFACE 
 
 THE epithets, speculative and suggestive, have not been 
 given to these Essays without due consideration. Written in 
 the isolation of this Alpine retreat, they express the opinions 
 and surmisings of one who long has watched in solitude, ' as 
 from a ruined tower,' the world of thought, and circumstance, 
 and action. To such an one it may, perhaps, be pardoned 
 if he prove a trifle whimsical in speculation and fantastic in 
 suggestion. I am aware that the first, second, and sixteenth 
 Essays will be judged, by many who may read them, to 
 exceed the bounds of that critical common-sense which is 
 recommended in the third. Possibly my prolonged seclusion 
 from populous cities and the society of intellectual equals a 
 seclusion which has lasted now, with short and occasional 
 interruptions, through twelve years the renunciation of am- 
 bitious aims and active interests implied in such a life, and 
 the peculiar influences to which those are subjected who 
 spend a seven months' winter, year after year, among white 
 snow-drifts and inhospitable, storm-swept mountains, have 
 bred in me a mystical habit of regarding man's relation to 
 the universe. In these conditions, and forced by broken 
 health to meditate upon the problem of approaching death, 
 a student comes insensibly to think more of nature and the 
 world, less of humanity and self, than when he is swimming 
 down the stream of competitive existence. The particular
 
 Xvi PREFACE 
 
 loses importance in his range of vision. The universal, little 
 understood, but powerfully felt, assumes ascendancy over his 
 imagination. He is like one who surveys the world of things 
 from a solitary mountain peak or from the centre of a bound- 
 less desert. Faiths spring up in him which have closer 
 analogy with the first intuitions of primitive races than with 
 the logical and analytical systems of reasoned thought. Such 
 as they are, these penetrate his mind, and give peculiar tone 
 to all his utterances. The point of view from which many of 
 the more critical Essays in this collection have been written 
 would not be apparent without a frank expression of the 
 speculative thoughts that underlie them. I have, therefore, 
 not shrunk from committing myself to theories and surmises 
 which are advanced in no dogmatic spirit. To suggest ideas, 
 to stimulate reflection, is the object of a book like this. At 
 the same time, were I asked in what order these Essays ought 
 to be studied, I should recommend most people to leave ' The 
 Philosophy of Evolution ' unread, until one or another of 
 the following articles aroused in them some curiosity about 
 the author's views upon religion and man's relation to the 
 universe. 
 
 DAVOS PLATZ, 
 
 Feb. 24th, 1890. 
 
 N.B. Seven of the following Essays have appeared, in whole or part, 
 in The Fortnightly Review, one in Time, and one in The Century Guild 
 Hobby-Horse. One has been extracted from a paper previously pub- 
 lished in my own ' Italian Byways.' All these have been re-written to 
 a large extent. The remaining ten, together with the Appendices, are 
 new, and come before the public for the first time now.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OP EVOLUTION 1 
 
 ON THE APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 
 
 TO ART AND LITERATURE 27 
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OP CRITICISM 53 
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS .... 79 
 ON THE RELATION OF ART TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 95 
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM . . . .108 
 
 THE MODEL . ... . ... . . , .128 
 
 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 137 
 CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE . . 155 
 
 NOTES ON STYLE : 
 
 PART I. HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WOBD .... 166 
 
 PART II. NATIONAL STYLE 174 
 
 PAST III. PERSONAL STYLE 217 
 
 PART IV. THE ART OF STYLE ....... 224 
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART. WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WALT WHIT- 
 HAN 237 
 
 LANDSCAPE 269 
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 800 
 
 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM A CRITICISM OF LIFE? A REVIEW 
 
 OF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S SELECTION FROM WORDSWORTH , . 315
 
 xviii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ? . 335 
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 345 
 
 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN WITH VICTORIAN 
 
 POETRY . 365 
 
 APPENDIX : 
 
 DABWTN'S THOUGHTS ABOCT GOD . 399 
 
 THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 403 
 
 NOTES ON THEISM 408 
 
 THE CRITEBION OF ABT 412 
 
 NOTE ON ' REALISM AND IDEALISM ' 414 
 
 NOTE ON ' THE MODEL ' 418 
 
 PBIOBITY OF THOUGHT TO LANGUAGE ...... 419 
 
 COLOUR-SENSE AND LANGUAGE . . . . .. . .420 
 
 INDEX . 428
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 To discuss God apart from Nature is both difficult and perilous ; it is 
 as if we separated the soul from the body. We know the soul 
 only through the body, and God only through Nature. Hence the 
 absurdity, as it appears to me, of accusing those of absurdity who 
 philosophically have united God with the world. For everything 
 which exists necessarily pertains to the essence of God ; therefore 
 God is the one Being whose existence includes all things. GOETHE 
 (circa 1770), translated by G. R. Lewes. 
 
 IP we attempt to seize the main fact in the intellectual 
 development of the last half -century, we shall find that this 
 may be described as the triumph of the scientific method in 
 relation to all man's thought about the universe. We have 
 gained our present standing-point by a long process of experi- 
 mental and philosophical labour, which has been carried on 
 through three centuries in Europe, and which culminated 
 recently in the hypothesis of Evolution. 
 
 This hypothesis cannot be separated from those sciences 
 which demonstrate the cosmic unity, analyse the elements of 
 matter, investigate the origins of life upon our earth, and 
 explore the obscure stages of primitive human history. It 
 cannot be dissociated from those metaphysical speculations 
 regarding man's relation to the world which received poetic 
 
 I
 
 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 utterance from Bruno and Goethe, and found logical expression 
 in the systems of a priori thinkers like Hegel. 
 
 Evolution, in the widest sense of the term, has to be viewed 
 as a generalisation which combines the data of previous 
 scientific and philosophical thought in a new conception of 
 the universe. Like all such generalisations, it is hypothetical, 
 provisional. Though it has received valuable inductive and 
 experimental support in the region of biology, it does not 
 rest upon the same foundation as Newton's law or as the 
 law of the Conservation of Energy. It must rather be 
 regarded as a comprehensive scheme of thought, inviting 
 demonstration, stimulating discovery, and capable of manifold 
 application. 
 
 Least of all does Evolution, as its name and as its prin- 
 ciples imply, claim for itself finality. Its adaptation, however, 
 to the present conditions of the human mind is proved by the 
 rapidity with which it is transforming every department of 
 speculation. 
 
 In the following pages it will be my object to show reason 
 why the Philosophy of Evolution, instead of crushing the 
 aspirations of humanity and reducing our conceptions of the 
 world to chaos, may be expected to reanimate religion and to 
 restore spirituality to the universe. 
 
 II 
 
 This idea is undoubtedly the most potent which has 
 entered the sphere of human thought since Copernicus pub- 
 lished his heliocentric theory of the Solar System. When we 
 inquire into the nature of religions, we shall find that they 
 are all of them at root attempts to account for the universe, 
 and to define man's place in the sphere of things. This being 
 the case, it follows that every new cosmological idea, every 
 fresh hypothesis regarding the beginning of the world and 
 man, every alteration in the theory of Nature, will induce 
 changes in the current systems of theology, metaphysics, 
 morals. Now the mythological elements of Christianity took 
 shape in the intellects of people who conceived our earth to
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 3 
 
 be the centre of the universe; who were accustomed to 
 believe that God made the sun and moon and stars to shed 
 light on us ; and who fancied that the divine purpose in 
 creating nature was to form a dwelling-place for man. The 
 dogmatic elements of historical Christianity in like manner 
 assumed their fixity by slow degrees under the dominance of 
 Ptolemy's geocentric system of astronomy, and in harmony 
 with a metaphysic which accepted that view of the universe. 
 The discovery, published by Copernicus in 1543, by simply 
 shifting the position of our globe in space, shook the ponderous 
 fabric of scholastic theology to its foundations. The deduc- 
 tions made from his discovery by subsequent thinkers still 
 more seriously compromised a large part of that edifice. The 
 earth appeared not merely as a satellite of the sun ; but the 
 sun himself, with all his court of planets, took rank as only 
 one among innumerable sidereal companies. Space spread 
 into infinity. Up and down, heaven above and hell beneath, 
 were now phrases of symbolical or metaphorical significance 
 only. It was no longer possible to imagine that the celestial 
 bodies had been created in order to give light by day and 
 night. Man's station of eminence in the kosmos ceased to 
 seem manifest. It became difficult to take the scheme of 
 salvation, God's sacrifice of himself in the Second Person of 
 the Trinity for the advantage of a race located on a third-rate 
 planet, literally. Some mythical parts of the religion, which 
 had previously been held as facts, were immediately changed 
 into allegories. For instance, the ascension of Jesus from the 
 mountain lost its value as an historical event when the brazen 
 vault of heaven, or the crystal sphere on the outer surface of 
 which God sat, had been annihilated ; when there was no 
 more up or down, and when a body lifted into ether would 
 obey the same laws of attraction as a meteoric stone. 
 
 The Copernican discovery very materially influenced 
 Christian dogma and mythology by thus converting at a 
 stroke what had been previously accepted as a matter of 
 literal and historical fact into symbol, allegory, metaphor. It 
 humbled human pride, and destroyed the overweening sense 
 of man's importance in the universe. The nature of this 
 
 B'2
 
 4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 revolution in astronomy made it of necessity destructive to the 
 external coatings and integuments of religion. At the same 
 time, it stimulated the growth of a new metaphysic, the first 
 manifestations of which we owe to Bruno, and which was 
 destined to react upon theology through the idealistic specula- 
 tions of the last two centuries. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The disintegration of those factors which are merely 
 temporal, and doomed to dissolution, in Christianity, has 
 been advancing so rapidly, through the application of various 
 critical methods and the growth of sciences, that little of a 
 purely destructive influence was to be expected from the 
 theory of Evolution. Some points, however, may arrest 
 attention. 
 
 Preceded by geology and primitive anthropology, Evolu- 
 tion dealt a death-blow at the assumptions of human self- 
 conceit. We have accepted the probability of man's 
 development from less highly organised types of animal life 
 with tolerable good-humour, after a certain amount of 
 rebellious disgust. The study of pre-historical humanity, 
 together with the suggestions of the Evolution hypothesis, 
 render any doctrine of a Fall more and more untenable. 
 Instead of Paradise, and man's sudden lapse from primal 
 innocence, we are now convinced that history implies a slow 
 and toilsome upward effort on the part of our ancestors from 
 the outset. 
 
 Preceded, in like manner, by the demonstrated theories 
 of Conservation and Correlation of Energies, Evolution 
 destroyed the old conception of miraculous occurrences. A 
 miracle, a freak of power, is no longer conceivable in Nature ; 
 and if Lazarus were raised from the dead before our eyes, we 
 should first ascertain the fact, and next proceed to investigate 
 the law of the phenomenon. Evolution, in the last place, 
 superseded scholastic teleology by more rational notions of 
 order. The habit of mind which recognised particular design 
 -^ and providential interference in special adaptations of living
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 5 
 
 creatures to their environment, has been superseded by what 
 may be termed a consistently biological view of the universe. 
 The whole scheme of things is now regarded as a single 
 organism, advancing methodically through stages of its 
 growth in obedience to inevitable laws of self-expansion. 
 This does not dispel the mystery which surrounds life. It 
 does not pretend, when rightly understood, to give a final 
 or sufficient explanation of Being. Nor, again, does it yield 
 the world to chance, or remove the necessity by which we 
 postulate the priority of thought, intention, spirit, to all 
 manifestations of material existence. But it compels us to 
 regard this form-giving spiritual potency as inherent in the 
 organism : as the law of its life, not as the legislation of some 
 power extraneous to it. In another very important point 
 Evolution has reacted destructively on popular Christianity. 
 By penetrating our minds with the conviction that all things 
 are in process, that the whole universe is literally in per- 
 petual Becoming, it has rendered it impossible for us to 
 believe that any one creed or set of opinions possesses 
 finality. Keligions, like all things that are ours and human, 
 have their day of declension ; nor can Christianity form an 
 exception to the universal rule. What is perishable in its 
 earthly historical manifestation must be eliminated ; and 
 the permanent spirit by which it is animated, the truth it 
 reveals, will be absorbed into the structure of creeds destined 
 successively to supersede it and be superseded. 
 
 IV 
 
 The fundamental conception which underlies the Evolu- 
 tionary method of thought is that all things in the universe 
 exist in process. No other system has so vigorously enforced 
 the truth that it is impossible to isolate phenomena from 
 their antecedents and their consequents. No other system 
 has given the same importance to apparently insignificant 
 details and to apparently monstrous divergences from normal 
 types, in so far as such details supply links in the sequence 
 of development, or such divergences can be used to illustrate
 
 6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 the growth of organism. It follows that the line of thought 
 which we call Evolutionary infuses new vitality into history, 
 into every study of the past, and into all branches of criticism. 
 At the present moment I wish to contribute some considera- 
 tions regarding the most obvious ways of applying it to the 
 history of art and literature not because this is a matter of 
 first importance, but because I speak with firm personal con- 
 viction on the topic. 
 
 When I was a young man, in the sixties, I remember 
 that we students of European culture had to choose between 
 connoisseurs and metaphysicians for our guides. On the 
 one hand were the people who praised the ' Correggiosity of 
 Correggio,' or ' swore by Perugino,' or promulgated the 
 ' preciousness of Fra Angelico,' as though Correggio, Perugino, 
 and the Dominican painter of San Marco were respectively 
 descended full-formed from the skies to instruct an un- 
 enlightened world. Each connoisseur sailed under his self- 
 chosen flag, proclaimed his own proclivities, and preached the 
 gospel of his particular taste. There were not wanting even 
 folk who pinned their faith to Sir Joshua and the Caracci. 
 Caprice on this side governed judgment ; and what I have 
 stated with regard to figurative art was no less true of poetry 
 and literature. There seemed to be no light or leading in the 
 chaos of opinion. On the other hand were ranged the formal 
 theorists, who constructed a scheme of art upon subjective 
 principles. They bade us direct our minds to the idea, the 
 Begriff of art ; and having thence obtained a concept, we 
 were invited to reject as valueless whatever would not square 
 with the logical formula. 
 
 Between these opposed teachers, the pure connoisseurs and 
 the pure metaphysicians, Goethe emerged like a steady guiding 
 star. His felicitous summary of criticism, ' Im Ganzen, Guten, 
 Schonen, resolut zu leben ' (To live resolvedly in the whole, 
 the good, the beautiful), came like a deliverance. Instinctively 
 we felt that the central point for us, if we would erect criticism 
 into a science, was not caprice, not personal proclivity, not 
 particular taste, but a steady comprehension of the whole. 
 How to grasp the whole, how to reach a point of view from
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 7 
 
 which all manifestations of the human mind should appear 
 as correlated, should fall into their proper places as parts of a 
 complex organism, remained the difficulty. 
 
 Honour should here be rendered to M. Taine, who was 
 among the first to apply natural physiological principles to 
 the study of what is understood as culture. His method 
 drew attention to the milieu, the ethnological conditions, the 
 climatic and social environments, which modify each par- 
 ticular product of human genius in art and literature. He 
 was on the right track ; but there remained something stiff 
 and formal, a something inconsistent with the subtlety of 
 Nature, in his philosophy of culture. In particular, it did 
 not make sufficient allowances for the resistance which the 
 individual offers to his milieu, for the emergence in him of 
 specific strains of atavism, and for the peculiar phenomena 
 of mental hybrids. 
 
 Just then Darwin's and Spencer's publication of the 
 Evolution theory made its decisive impact on the mind of 
 Europe. We felt that here was the right way toward living 
 and thinking in the whole. The steady determination to regard 
 all subjects of inquiry from the point of view of development 
 delivered criticism from the caprice of connoisseurship and 
 the whims of dilettantism. It superseded the attractive but 
 too often vaporous generalisations of the logician by a sound 
 method of analysis. It lent the charm of biography or 
 narrative to what had previously seemed so dull and lifeless 
 the history of art or letters. Illuminated by this idea, 
 every stage in the progress of culture acquired significance. 
 The origins and incunabula of art, viewed in their relation 
 to its further growth, ceased to have a merely antiquarian 
 interest. Periods of decadence were explicable and intelligible 
 on the principle that every organism, expanding from the 
 germ, passing through adolescence to maturity, is bound at 
 last to exhaust its motive force and perish by exaggerating 
 qualities implicit in the mature type. Hybrids, in like manner, 
 obtained a fresh instructiveness and value for students of the 
 unmixed species. 
 
 It might perhaps be objected that I am claiming too much
 
 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 for the scientific impulse of the last half -century. Have not 
 all histories, it will be said, at all periods of the world, been 
 written in this way ? Has not all criticism proceeded upon 
 this method? I would recommend those who ask these 
 questions to peruse Tiraboschi's ' Storia della Letteratura 
 Italiana,' one of the most solid and valuable monuments of 
 erudition; or if that is requiring too much from human 
 patience, let them take up Hallam's 'Literature of Europe.' 
 Next I would point to the magnificent criticism, in all parts 
 instinct with genius, which our age owes to Mr. Ruskin. I 
 think it will be found that neither in Tiraboschi's conscien- 
 tious and exhaustive record of his nation's culture, nor in 
 Mr. Buskin's luminous discourse upon the principles of art 
 and the merits or demerits of particular artists, does the 
 specific note which marks the Evolutionist appear. The 
 mind of neither of these men is directed to the study of a 
 process in the past. They do not set themselves to tracing 
 and explaining what Goethe and Oken termed the morpho- 
 logy of their subject. I do not mean to assert that they 
 must be wrong, and that Evolutionary historians and critics 
 must be right. My purpose is to insist upon an important 
 difference. 
 
 I admit that there is a danger in the exclusive application 
 of the Evolutionary method, against which both historians 
 and critics must be upon their guard. Absorption in the 
 process we are studying may blunt our sensibility to relative 
 degrees of moral and artistic excellence in the work we have 
 to estimate. We may come to think that the demonstration 
 of development is all that is required of us ; whereas it is 
 only the beginning of our task, the clue that guides us 
 through the labyrinth of research, the principle which gives 
 coherence to our exposition. We may be so interested, for 
 example, in analysing how the dying tree of Italian painting 
 put forth its final shoot in the Bolognese school, that we shall 
 not express a due sense of the relative and intrinsic inferiority 
 of the pictures produced in that decadent age. There is, I 
 repeat, a danger of sacrificing individuality and blunting the 
 edge of critical judgment if we attempt to live too resolutely
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 9 
 
 in the whole. But, fortunately, all the vices, foibles, and 
 passions of human nature tend in quite the opposite direc- 
 tion. Caprice and whim and partiality do not need to be 
 encouraged. We run but little risk of exchanging these 
 congenital defects for rigid method and relentless logic. 
 Again, there is no reason why students who add interest to 
 their labours by the inspiration of this idea an idea which 
 infuses life into every matter of inquiry should therefore 
 lose their faculty of judgment. He must be singularly stupid 
 who does not perceive the immeasurable distance between 
 Greene and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Davenant, because 
 he has demonstrated that Greene was necessary to the evolu- 
 tion of Shakespeare, and that Davenant was his inevitable 
 successor. Such a man, if he writes a dull book under the 
 influence of Evolutionary ideas, would assuredly have written 
 a still duller one without them. 
 
 I pass now to that more difficult and delicate portion of 
 my theme which concerns the higher region of religion, 
 metaphysic, and morality. That remoulding and recasting 
 process, which is for ever going forward in the intellectual 
 no less than the corporeal organism, has been committed, 
 for this century at least, to the custody of what is roughly 
 termed Science. 
 
 The tendency of scientific ideas, in so far as these are 
 remoulding thought in those high regions, is to spiritualise 
 religion, to dissipate the materialistic associations which 
 environ theology in its mythological stages, and to emanci- 
 pate the individual from egotism in the presence of that 
 universal Being of which he is a part, and to the manifesta- 
 tion of which he contributes. 
 
 When Cleanthes, the Stoic, wrote the prayer which I will 
 presently translate, he projected a religion commensurate 
 with modern Science. ' Lead Thou me, Zeus,' he prayed, 
 ' and thou world's Law, whithersoever I am by you appointed 
 to go ; for I will follow unreluctant ; and yet should I refuse,
 
 10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 
 through evilnass (or cowardice) up-grown in me, none the less 
 I shall surely follow." i 
 
 We cannot get beyond that : we need not seek to do so ; 
 for this prayer ia. compatible with every creed, and it contains 
 the essence of absolute self -dedication. 
 
 By convincing us that the universe is one homogeneous 
 whole, in which nothing can be lost and unaccounted for, 
 through which therQ runs a continuity of energising forces, 
 and of which we are indisputably conscious members, Science 
 has lent deeper meaning to the Stoic prayer. But it has not, 
 on that account, eliminated the conception of a Deity or 
 effaced the noble humanities secured for us by many centuries 
 of Christian faith. It cannot be too emphatically insisted on 
 that much-dreaded Darwinism leaves the theological belief 
 in a Divine Being untouched. God is not less God, nor is 
 creative energy less creative, because we are led to suppose 
 that a lengthy instead of a. sudden method was employed in 
 the production of the Kosmos. 
 
 VI 
 
 The conceptions of God and Law tend to coalescence in 
 the scientific theory of thQ universe. In other words, 
 spirituality is restored to Nature, which comes to be regarded 
 as a manifestation of infinite vitality. The Fathers of the 
 Christian Churches, battling with corrupt Paganism, striving 
 valiantly to secure monotheistic principles of theology, basing 
 conduct upon hopes and terrors in the world beyond the 
 grave, effected an artificial separation of man from Nature. 
 They banned the logical and simple recognition of man's 
 integration with the Kosmos, upon which the elder religions 
 rested. Nature for many centuries was regarded as the evil 
 thing, the contrary of Spirit. Science, which grew up in 
 this uncongenial atmosphere, accepted the separation from 
 the outset, and went on studying Nature as though it were 
 
 1 In another place Cleanthes declares that there is no higher 
 guerdon for gods or mortals than to sing the praises of the universal 
 Law Koivbv ael v6/j.ov fi> 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 <povi/xoi, decides. 
 Insurgents against their judgment in the case for example 
 of acknowledged masters like Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, 
 Mozart are doomed to ultimate defeat, because this judgment 
 is really based upon abiding relations, upon truths for human 
 nature which have been expressed in art. 
 
 Our hope for the future with regard to unity of taste is 
 then : that, academical and sentimental seekings after a fixed 
 ideal having been abandoned, and transient theories founded
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 59 
 
 upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities having been 
 exploded, the scientific spirit shall make men more and more 
 capable of living resolutely in the whole, more and more 
 conscious of permanent relations. In proportion as we gain 
 a truer conception of our own place in the world, in propor- 
 tion as we refuse to accept anything which is not positive and 
 solid, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive 
 certitude what is simple, natural, truthful, honest, and shall 
 welcome all artistic products in so far as they exhibit these 
 qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then 
 be the taste of a mentally healthy and impartial person, who 
 has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art 
 and in society, and who is able to test the excellence of work 
 in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning 
 what there is of sincerity and natural vigour in it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thus far I wrote three years ago upon this topic, seeking 
 to define the critic's mental attitude towards his task. 
 
 Resuming the same subject from a somewhat different 
 point of view, it will be well to inquire first what we mean by 
 criticism. 
 
 The term critic (6 Kptri^og and critioys) is classical both in 
 Greek and Latin literature. According to its derivation, it 
 means one who is competent to be a judge, the judges in 
 poetic contests at Athens having been called Kpiral. The 
 notion of judgment lies therefore at the root of criticism ; and 
 the critic is a man who pronounces judgment upon the work 
 of others. 
 
 This sense of the word was accepted without question until 
 recently. The critic claimed to rank as umpire, trained by 
 special studies for pronouncing on the merits of authors and 
 of artists. He supported his decision by appeal to precedents, 
 established canons, accepted definitions. Some difference of 
 opinion existed as to the validity of certain rules ; but no one 
 doubted that the critic was a judge, or that it was his function 
 to apply rules. As in jurisprudence law is made by the
 
 60 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 decision of judges, so in criticism the code of taste was formed 
 by the dicta of eminent experts. 
 
 To this primary conception of criticism, a second has been 
 recently opposed. It is contended that the critic should 
 resign his pretensions to the judicial ermine. He must drop 
 the ferule of the archididascalus, and assume the humbler 
 pointing-rod of the showman. It is not his function to pro- 
 nounce from the bench on what is right or wrong, to acquit or 
 to condemn, to apply canons and extend the province of 
 orthodox taste by enforcing laws. On the contrary, he ought 
 to be content with studying and displaying the qualities of 
 things submitted to his intellect and senses. He must unfold 
 the ' virtues ' of the works of art with which he has been 
 occupied. He must classify and describe them, as a botanist 
 the plants with which he has to do. In a certain sense, he 
 may also take rank among creators by reproducing the 
 masterpieces of poet or of painter with engaging rhetoric, or 
 by eloquently exhibiting his own sensibilities in animated 
 prose. 
 
 Thus we have already two distinct conceptions of the critic 
 as judge and as showman. These depend on radical and 
 fundamental points of difference in our interpretation of the 
 term. They are harmonised, to some extent, in a third and 
 still more modern conception. According to this, the critic 
 is neither a mere judge nor a mere showman. He must 
 become the natural historian of art and literature, must study 
 each object in relation to its antecedents and its consequents, 
 must make himself acquainted with the conditions under 
 which the artist grew, the habits of his race, the opinions of 
 his age, his physical and psychological peculiarities. Only 
 after having conscientiously pursued this method, may he 
 proceed to deliver judgments ; and these will invariably be 
 qualified by his sense of relativity in art and literature. 
 
 We have now three conceptions of the critic as judge, 
 as showman, and as scientific analyst. The first corresponds 
 to what may be termed classical criticism. It prevailed in 
 modern Europe till the close of the last century. The revo- 
 lutionary spirit of that epoch called the magisterial authority
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 61 
 
 of classical criticism in question, and introduced the second of 
 the three conceptions, which corresponds to what may be 
 termed romantic criticism. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of 
 science led to the third conception, which takes for granted 
 that the arts are capable of being historically studied in their 
 evolution. 
 
 Classical criticism rested upon a logical basis. It assumed 
 the existence of certain fixed principles, from which correct 
 udgments might be deduced. Komantic criticism substituted 
 sympathies and antipathies for rules, and exchanged authority 
 for personal opinion. Scientific criticism proceeds by induc- 
 tion, historical investigation, morphological analysis, mis- 
 doubting the certainty of aesthetic principles, regarding the 
 instincts and sensibilities of the individual with distrust, 
 seeking materials for basing the canons of perfection upon 
 some positive foundation. 
 
 According to etymology, the fundamental function of 
 criticism is judgment ; and during the classical period no 
 doubt was cast upon the critic's right to judge. In the 
 romantic period this function was disputed, and the rules by 
 which a verdict could be pronounced were opened to discus- 
 sion. In scientific criticism the idea returns to itself again, 
 but on an altered basis. The critic arrives at conclusions 
 after preparatory studies in history, psychology, scholarship, 
 by means of which he hopes to ground his judgment ton 
 sufficient demonstration. 
 
 In each of the three stages which I have indicated, 
 judgment is undoubtedly implied. The classical critic judged 
 by principles, and by the decisions of his predecessors by 
 Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Aristarchus, Boileau. The 
 romantic critic judged by his own preferences and pro- 
 clivities like the Semiramis of Dante 
 
 Che libito fe lecito in sua legge. 
 
 The scientific critic judges, but does not do so without 
 understanding the natural and historical conditions of the 
 product under examination, and without making the allow- 
 ances demanded by his sense of relativity. For example, 
 he will not, like the classical critic, pronounce the ' Divine
 
 62 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 Comedy ' to be ' une amplification stupidemeut barbare/ 
 because he has no sympathy with the Middle Ages, and 
 because this poem cannot be made to square with the 
 orthodox canon of the epic. He will not, like the romantic 
 critic, exalt the ' Song of Eoland ' while he decries the 
 ' Gerusalemme Liberata,' because he is enthusiastic for semi- 
 barbarous sublimity and feels a prejudice against the monu- 
 ments of artificial art. In these three cases he applies 
 himself to explaining why the ' Divine Comedy,' the ' Song 
 of Koland,' and the ' Gerusalemme Liberata ' took certain and 
 specific forms, and how each work of art in question was 
 related to its age. Afterwards, he is at liberty to pronounce 
 opinions as to the success with which the forms have been 
 evolved, and to show reason why one or the other of them, 
 according to his judgment, ought to be regarded as the nobler 
 kind of art. 
 
 IV 
 
 The three types of criticism which I have called classical, 
 romantic, and scientific the three sorts of critics, described 
 by me as judges, showmen, natural historians co-exist, and 
 have, to some extent, always co-existed, although it is correct 
 to view them as representing successive stages in time. The 
 true critic must combine all three types in himself, and hold 
 the balance by his sense of their reciprocal relations. He 
 cannot abnegate the right to judge ; he cannot divest himself 
 of subjective tastes which colour his judgment ; but it is his 
 supreme duty to train his faculty of judgment and to temper 
 his subjectivity by the study of things in their historical 
 connections. 
 
 Heraclitus has a weighty saying, which those who aim at 
 sound criticism should bear in mind. 1 ' It behoves us,' he 
 
 1 This fragment of Heraclitus is reported by Sextus Empiricus. 
 The \6yos {wvbs of the original, which is opposed to iSia typovntris, must 
 probably be taken in connection with the philosopher's theory of a 
 pantheistic spirit, in which alone is truth, and in the participation with 
 which alone is human wisdom. My application of the sentence is 
 therefore to some extent derivative. See Bywater's Heracliti Ephesii 
 Beliquics, p. 38, for the Greek text.
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 63 
 
 remarks, ' to follow the common reason of the world ; yet, 
 though there is a common reason in the world, the majority 
 live as though they possessed a wisdom peculiar each unto 
 himself alone.' 
 
 The object of education is to provide us in youth with a 
 sense of this common reason a just if general view of what 
 mankind as a whole is a notion of what has been thought 
 and wrought by our race in its totality, of what humanity at 
 its best and strongest has achieved by interrupted yet con- 
 tinuous effort, of how we come to be what we are and to 
 think and feel as we do. Humanism, the study of history 
 and literature and art and law, suffices better than any other 
 training for this needful propaedeutic. It is superior to the 
 study of mathematical and natural science, because its matter 
 is of greater moral and mental importance to humanity ; 
 while, as a discipline, it is not inferior if rigorously con- 
 ducted upon systematic method. Such education prepares the 
 specialist to judge with width of sympathy and due regard 
 for relations, to overcome personal caprice and predilection, 
 and to survey the particular plot he selects for exploration as 
 part of one great whole. 
 
 It may be added that liberal culture of the sort described 
 goes far towards emancipating men from the vanity which 
 aims at originality in and out of season. In their desire to 
 be original, or to appear original, critics too often forget the 
 paramount necessity of being true. It is better to repeat old 
 things, if they are true, than to improvise new things, if they 
 are not true. A man who thinks that he has caught some 
 novel glimpse upon a well-worn subject, is tempted to distort 
 the truth in his eagerness to do the discovery full justice. 
 This leads to paradox : and paradox, though bolstered up 
 with epigram, has no prospect of survival except through the 
 grain of truth which may be contained in it. 
 
 There is a difficulty here for the critic, who must always 
 to some extent appear as the law-giver or law-expounder. 
 From time to time he will find himself, through his own 
 sincerity, in the position of an innovator, and may expect to 
 be classified with the paradox-mongers. In these cicum-
 
 64 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 stances, it must suffice for him to see whether he has 
 sincerely tested his particular wisdom (I8ia <poV>;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 <povi/*oi or men of sober wisdom.
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 67 
 
 How difficult his duty is, and how ill it is performed for the 
 most part, none knows better than one who has attempted to 
 discharge it in a sincere and modest spirit. Common sense, 
 sagacity, justice of perception, openness to ideas, susceptibility 
 to beauty, sufficient information, the power of weighing 
 evidence and estimating the worth of testimony : these 
 qualities constitute the critic, and whoever possesses and 
 exercises them is a critic, whatever else he may be. 
 
 When judging or pronouncing an opinion, he has to con- 
 sider both the matter and the form of that which is presented 
 to his mind what the work of art contains, and how it is 
 put forth. Since then all art expresses what the artist has 
 perceived, thought, and felt concerning external nature, 
 mankind, and himself the world, human life, and his own 
 being the critic asks : How far in this case is perception just, 
 accurate, penetrative, subtle ? How far is the representation 
 of life and nature adequate to fact ? To what extent is the 
 product in harmony with the best thought, the noblest 
 emotions, the worthiest sentiments of our rp,ee ? What kind 
 of individuality is indicated in the work? Does the artist 
 show himself to be a man of normal or abnormal tempera- 
 ment ? By right of what particular quality, moral, intellectual, 
 and sensuous, does he claim attention ? In what relation does 
 he stand to the permanent facts of human nature ? How is 
 he related to the spirit of his age and nation ; and what has 
 he contributed to the sum of culture? The substance or 
 content of a work of art being inseparable from its form, the 
 critic connects these questions with a parallel series of 
 interrogations regarding the artist's style, his command of the 
 particular vehicle adopted for expression, his attitude toward 
 the art of his own century, and the genius of the nation to 
 which he belongs. When we speak of critical judgment, we 
 assume that a double process of inquiry upon these lines has 
 consciously or unconsciously been gone through by the critic. 
 His final utterance or verdict is a summing up of the impres- 
 sions made upon him by the work subjected to his sensibility 
 and analytic reason. His experience of life, his susceptibility 
 to beauty, his knowledge of history, his insight into character, 
 
 F2
 
 68 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 his powers of observation, Ms technical acquirements, are 
 brought into play at every moment by the work of art before 
 him, just as the same faculties were exercised by the artist 
 while producing that work, which is the sign and symbol of 
 the impressions made upon him by the aspects of nature, the 
 tragedy or comedy of human life, and the drama of his own 
 inner experience. The artist presents a view of the world 
 and man gained at first hand from the object. The critic 
 repeats a view of the world and man at second hand with the 
 work of art as object. The artist does not reason or explain. 
 The critic states or implies reasons for his opinion ; and it is 
 this difference between the creative and the critical act which 
 imports into the latter an obvious exercise of the judicial 
 faculty. Art itself implies judgment. By his selection of 
 subjects and manner of treatment, the artist betrays a 
 voluntary or involuntary preference, which constitutes his 
 judgment on the things he represents. But the critic, having 
 not merely to clothe impressions in form, but to give an 
 account of them, and if possible to explain his opinion 
 persuasively to the intelligence of the world, brings the act 
 of judgment, which is logically involved in every mental 
 operation, more prominently and deliberately forward. 
 
 VII 
 
 In criticism there is an unavoidable subjective element, 
 which will always prevent it from being in the exact sense 
 scientific. Products of the human mind are not to be classified 
 in the same way as products of nature. It is doubtful 
 whether the history of arts and literatures will ever be placed 
 upon the same footing as geology and botany. Far less have 
 we the right to expect that the criticism (as distinguished 
 from the history) of literary and artistic work will be governed 
 by a method independent of the critic's personality. 
 
 In criticism the mind of one individual, qualified by 
 certain idiosyncratic properties, and further qualified by the 
 conditions of his race and age, is brought to bear upon the 
 product of another human mind, itself qualified by certain
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 69 
 
 idiosyncratic properties and further qualified by the conditions 
 of a certain race and century. In this way a quadruple 
 element of subjectivity enters into the final estimate, as will 
 appear from the following diagram : 
 
 A D 
 
 b c e f 
 
 Here A stands for the artist, b for his temperament, c for 
 what we will call his milieu. D stands for the critic, e for his 
 temperament, / for his milieu. Thus the relation between A 
 and D, the artist and the critic, involves a blending of b, c, e,f, 
 so uncertain in its combinations as to preclude scientific exacti- 
 tude in the estimate formed by the latter. Moral, political, 
 religious, {esthetic, sensuous sympathies and antipathies play 
 their inevitable part, preventing the intellect of the critic from 
 fully attaining to that quality of dry light which should be 
 the object of his earnest effort. For like reasons, no two 
 critics will ever be able to take precisely the same view of 
 any one object of art. 
 
 Owing to this intrusion of subjectivity, one of the prime 
 difficulties of criticism is correct interpretation. How well- 
 nigh impossible it is to be quite sure that we have caught the 
 meaning, felt the tone of an ancient author ! The criticism 
 of the Bible, the criticism of Aristotle, and Plato, and Homer, 
 have suffered and are suffering from defective interpretation 
 to an extent of which the world is only tardily becoming 
 conscious. If we consider Calvin's interpretation of S. Paul 
 and Gladstone's views on Homer, what I mean by the blending 
 of quadruple subjectivity will be glaringly apparent. 
 
 Criticism, in the modern sense of the word, began with 
 the humanistic movement of the early Eenaissance. Those 
 first Italian scholars who collected Greek and Latin MSS. 
 approached the literature of antiquity with insufficient feeling 
 for its historical development. They regarded that vast mass 
 of documents, extending over about one thousand years, as 
 a totality, without perspective and without a just discrimina- 
 tion of successive periods. They assumed, for instance, that 
 the poem of ' Hero and Leander,' because it bore the name
 
 70 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 of Musaaus, was the very earliest instead of being, as it is, 
 one of the very latest products of Hellenic genius. They 
 interpreted the genuine dialogues of Plato by the light of 
 Proclus and Plotinus. They confounded the writings of 
 Aristotle with the traditions of his school and with the 
 glosses of Arabian commentators. In that first period of 
 scholarship there was little or no sense for the relative value 
 of evidence, no inquiry into the authority of witnesses. Latin 
 and Graeco-Roman writers, Cicero and Plutarch, were accepted 
 as conclusive with regard to well-nigh prehistoric stages in 
 the political history of Sparta. The verses of an Alexandrian 
 poet were studied side by side with genuine fragments of 
 Anacreon, as though both formed the relics of one author. 
 The epitomes of Diogenes Laertius, the biographies published 
 by Neoplatonic mystics, were regarded as authoritative on the 
 opinions of Pythagoras and Plato, Democritus and Heraclitus. 
 In the field of plastic art a similar want of discrimination 
 prevailed. Every statue of antiquity, whether proceeding 
 from the authentic chisel of Pheidias or from the workshop 
 of a craftsman in the age of Hadrian, appeared to have 
 an equal value. Originals and copies were alike the objects 
 of unquestioning veneration. 
 
 Thanks to the profound enthusiasm awakened by the 
 revival of learning in the fifteenth century, thanks also to 
 the fact that humanism now began to form the staple of 
 European culture, this stage of omnivorous acceptance and 
 encyclopaedic absorption merged into one of patient and 
 minute investigation. The microscope was applied to classical 
 literature ; its fragmentary state became apparent ; the 
 many centuries from Homer to Ausonius were reckoned ; 
 close study of style revealed much that was spurious, counter- 
 feit, of base alloy and of trifling evidential value in hitherto 
 revered authorities. The detailed examination of MSS- 
 required by editors of Greek and Latin authors proved an 
 excellent school in criticism. So did the controversies which 
 raged around the rival merits of Homer and Virgil as epic 
 poets, of Plato and Aristotle as philosophers. Penetrating 
 further into the spirit of the past, students began to perceive
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 71 
 
 in what respects the thinkers of the classic age differed from 
 themselves, and in what points humanity remained unaltered. 
 This comparison of a recovered civilisation with the civilisa- 
 tion of the sixteenth century, this shock of the Christian 
 with the Pagan mind, stimulated curiosity and encouraged 
 a keenly sceptical habit of investigation. Valla's exposure 
 of the false Decretals and the Donation of Constantine, and 
 his demonstration that the epistle of Abgarus was palpably 
 spurious, marked an epoch in the annals of destructive 
 criticism. Then came the movement of the Reformation in 
 Germany, and the movement of the New Philosophy in 
 Southern Italy, breaking down at one and the same time the 
 authority of ecclesiastical and of Aristotelian tradition, and 
 forcing men to regard documents, superstitiously accounted 
 sacred, in the light of common sense. 
 
 Thus criticism, as we understand it, emerged ; and one of 
 the main benefits derived from the Eevival of Learning is the 
 excitation of a sound instinct regarding its method. If we 
 owed nothing else to humanism, this alone should reconcile 
 us with the Renaissance; for science itself may be said to 
 have sprung into existence from habits of exact research 
 aroused by the scrupulous examination and comparison of 
 antique records. 
 
 The chief danger of criticism in its present stage is not 
 that patient and exhaustive investigation should be spared, 
 but that the critic should be insufficiently upon his guard 
 against subjective fancies, paradoxes of opinion, and super- 
 subtleties of ingenuity. Science suffers less from this peril, 
 though, even in science, the plausible hypotheses of brilliant 
 thinkers may be mistaken for demonstrations. The history 
 of Darwinism after the publication of the ' Origin of Species,' 
 in 1859, furnishes a very interesting example of criticism 
 applied for a series of years to a theory which startled the 
 world, and won its way by slow degrees under the test of 
 strict and hostile examination. Literature and art are 
 peculiarly liable, owing to their subject-matter, to distortion 
 and misrepresentation at the hands of historians and critics. 
 It behoves us, therefore, to be specially upon our guard
 
 72 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 against the importation of our own thoughts and feelings into 
 the works we have to deal with, and to be mindful that our 
 subjectivity is a perpetual source of danger. 
 
 It is something to have gained a clear conception of the 
 critical method. It is even more to have become aware of 
 its limitations. To this extent, then, through the perception 
 of what criti'cism ought to be, through the definition of its 
 province, and through the recognition of what is inevitably 
 imperfect in its instrument, the method tends to being in its 
 own way scientific. Each year adds to our systematic know- 
 ledge of arts and literatures ; and with each extension of that 
 knowledge the body of undisputed facts, the sum of accepted 
 opinions, are enlarged. It might almost be maintained that 
 we are slowly advancing towards a period at which criticism 
 will become deductive through the accumulation of principles 
 and their verification by the comparative method of study 
 applied to arts and letters. 
 
 VIII 
 
 At this point it is not unnatural to ask what are the rela- 
 tions between criticism and erudition. What is the real value 
 of laborious learning bibliographical, historical, philological, 
 etc. for the higher culture ? 
 
 The critic, if he has a right conception of his task, will 
 regard no knowledge, however formal, no information, how- 
 ever slight and seemingly irrelevant, as unimportarit for his 
 purpose. 
 
 It was from technical inquiries into the redaction of the 
 Gospels, the composition of the Pentateuch, the authorship 
 of the Psalms, the probable antiquity of the Book of Job, the 
 dramatic character of the Song of Solomon, the integrant 
 parts of Isaiah, the canon of S. Paul's epistles, the political 
 allusions in the Apocalypse, that sound views on the subject 
 of inspiration and the character in general of our sacred 
 writings gradually filtered into Biblical criticism. 
 
 We had not learned to know Shakespeare before we 
 attempted to disentangle his part in Pericles and The Two 
 ffoble Kinsmen ; before we tried to eliminate what does not
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 73 
 
 belong to him from Henry VIII. ; before we entertained 
 the question of touchings and rehandlings necessitated by his 
 double craft of theatre-proprietor and playwright. Not an 
 atom of dry-as-dust learning, derived from the microscopical 
 collation of texts, from anxious scrutiny of deeds and records, 
 from tedious bibliographical and chronological researches, 
 goes for naught in our intelligence of Shakespeare. 
 
 Each rill of minute investigation swells the main current of 
 criticism. Each limitation of the subject under consideration 
 acts like a useful dam against the irruption of conceit and 
 fancy in the critic. The more he knows of fact, the less can 
 he expatiate in regions of conjecture. 
 
 Take a minor instance. Suppose we are about to deal 
 with Sidney's ' Astrophel and Stella.' Have we here a key 
 to unlock Sidney's heart ? Are those enigmatical poems, the 
 first love-poems composed in England on a complicated auto- 
 biographical theme, to be accepted (as they seem to be 
 intended) for the diary of Sidney's feelings? Can they be 
 explained by what is known of the chronology of his brief 
 manhood ? What light is thrown upon them from the thre- 
 nodies with which his death was greeted, and the numerous 
 allusions to his name dispersed through all the writings of 
 that period ? To what extent must allowance be made for 
 the Italian influences under which the courtier-poet, the 
 travelled scholar, the morning star of the renascence in our 
 island, penned them ? Are they in fact the serious record of 
 real life-experience, or the sport of Platonising fancy in a 
 studied form of art, or something intermediate, to which 
 both man of heart and man of letters gave their quota ? 
 
 The answers to these questions, if any satisfactory answers 
 can be given, are only to be arrived at after a comparison of 
 dates, a study of collateral documentary evidence, a careful 
 examination of the allusions to facts and incidents embedded 
 in the poems, and a detailed analysis of the earliest printed 
 editions of the book with special reference to the order of the 
 several pieces. It is only by following such a method that 
 the critic will venture to decide how the sonnets and songs 
 which constitute the body of the work should be arranged,
 
 74 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 and whether Stella (the Lady Penelope Devereux) was a 
 married woman when Sidney wrote them. A special fami- 
 liarity with the Italian models then in vogue may help him 
 to form an opinion as to the imaginative nature of these 
 lyrics. With this end in view, he studies the types under 
 which that conventional style of utterance presented itself to 
 Elizabethan Englishmen, and carefully notes the differences 
 of tone and accent between Tasso and Bembo on the one 
 hand, and Sidney and Shakespeare on the other. 
 
 After such preliminary labours, true critics will often best 
 display their quality of wisdom by abandoning the problem 
 as insoluble. They will be content to state its conditions 
 as fairly and as comprehensively as possible, leaving their 
 readers to draw conclusions, and modestly suggesting the 
 path on which they have themselves been led. Indeed, it 
 is just here that the critic has to protect himself most warily 
 against his own subjective ingenuity. To construct a plau- 
 sible scheme of explanation, to fence it round with psycho- 
 logical hypotheses, to emphasize the points of evidence which 
 give colour to the view adopted, to attenuate conflicting testi- 
 mony, is cheap and easy enough. This is what minds of the 
 second order in criticism, with whom erudition and the theory 
 weigh more than an imperious anxiety to prove the truth, 
 delight in doing. But the test of a good critic is suspension 
 of judgment in cases which are not convincingly proven. 
 
 Take the more important instance of Shakespeare's sonnets. 
 We have all tried to wring the heart out of that mystery. 
 We have all felt the accent of acute passion alternating with 
 the accent of what looks like artificial compliment the 
 inequality of style, the inequality of emotion, the inequality 
 of artistic handling in those unparalleled outpourings of 
 a mighty poet's soul. We do not doubt their genuineness. 
 We trace the outlines of a story in them, which it is not 
 difficult to decipher, although the import may be painful. So 
 far we are agreed. But when it comes to deciding whether 
 Shakespeare intended a merely dramatic series of psycho- 
 logical lyrics, or whether he committed his own experience 
 from day to day to paper in the sonnets, or whether he wrote
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 75 
 
 them for a friend who Mr. W. H. was, and who the dark 
 lady was then at once we differ. As it seems to me, this is 
 the point at which sound criticism diverges from criticism 
 over-weighted with erudition or with subjective prepossession. 
 Queen Elizabeth, Lord Southampton, Lord Pembroke, William 
 Hughes, 1 William Himself, have successively posed, in the 
 schemes of constructive critics, for Mr. W. H. I need not 
 enlarge upon this topic, because the case of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets is only too familiar to every student of English 
 literature. I have adduced the instance simply because it 
 is a crucial one one in which the competent critic should 
 hail every contribution made by research or formulated by 
 a scheming brain for the solution of a sphinx-like problem, 
 but should avoid like a hidden rock tanquam scopulum 
 any temptation to construct a biographical romance out of 
 elements so slender, until irrefutable facts have been pre- 
 sented. In a word, criticism welcomes research, welcomes 
 discovery, welcomes constructive ingenuity. But she does 
 not recognise these things as criticism, and holds a dubious 
 balance until the case seems proved. The same may be said 
 about the less enigmatical problem of Tasso's relation to 
 Leonora d'Este. Let the critic state the problem as he finds 
 it, but not engage (unless he be convinced) in any of its 
 plausible solutions. Enough is left for the exercise of his 
 aesthetic judgment in the poetry of Shakespeare's and of 
 Tasso's sonnets. 
 
 These remarks bring to light two relations in which the 
 spirit of research and erudition is dangerous to criticism. 
 
 In the first place it inclines people to make too much of 
 mere externals as though one should persuade himself that 
 a knowledge of the bibliography of the ' Paradise Lost ' is 
 essential to the comprehension of that poem, or that the 
 1 Faery Queen ' demands a preparatory training in Anglo- 
 Saxon. You may know everything about the editions of 
 Milton's poems, and have their misprints at your fingers' end, 
 
 1 William Hughes had been in literary existence a century before 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde resuscitated this hypothetical youth in a magazine 
 of 1889.
 
 76 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 and yet remain incapable of feeling what is sublime in 
 Milton's conception and artistic in his execution. You may 
 be acquainted with the history of our language in all its stages, 
 and may be able to point out Spenser's archaeologisms, without 
 touching the points which make his epic valuable for culture. 
 You may discourse with the tongue of an angel upon the 
 dates of Shakespeare's plays, and at the same time show a 
 stolid incapacity for apprehending their true drift and nervous 
 grip on human life. In short, bibliography, linguistic studies, 
 questions of dates and sources, are only important as ancillary 
 to the real work of criticism, which is to interpret the work- 
 ings of the human spirit by its monuments in art and letters. 
 
 In the second place, erudition, when not controlled by 
 vigorous sense, encourages what may be described as the 
 modification of mares' nests a malady most incident to 
 ingenious but flighty theorists, who nourish the grotesque 
 fictions of their ignorance upon the milk of their ill- 
 assimilated learning. The misuse of erudition leads to such 
 fundamental misconceptions as that which vitiates Dr. Guest's 
 great work on English Rhythms. It renders the hypothesis 
 of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays attractive in 
 the eyes of incompetent students. It inflates blathery com- 
 pilations on esoteric Buddhism, Spiritualism, the history of 
 Secret Societies, the migrations of the ten Lost Tribes, Phallic 
 Worship, Apocalyptic Prophecy. For years it has infected 
 speculative writing on the evolution of religions, the inter- 
 pretation of mythology, the origin of language, ethnology, 
 phrenology, chiromancy, and all the bastard brood descended 
 from mediaeval astrology and magic. It taints the otherwise 
 sound work of many scholars of the German type, who have 
 not common sense or knowledge of life enough to save them 
 from fabricating preposterous solutions of perplexing problems, 
 and applying the resources of their knowledge to supporting 
 major premisses which are palpably absurd. 
 
 Learning cannot come amiss to those who understand its 
 use. He who has most of it is best equipped for criticism. 
 But learning does not supply the critical faculty. To criticism 
 it is the necessary foundation and a serviceable handmaid.
 
 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 77 
 
 Eightly employed, learning checks caprice, sustains our feet 
 on solid ground, and leads to hidden paths whereby we may 
 approach the truth. Misused, it smothers intuition in a 
 jungle of cumbrous and unimportant details, diverts attention 
 from the proper end of culture, or bases the vagaries of the 
 fancy upon sand-banks and rubble. 
 
 It seems trite to say so yet common sense, implying 
 knowledge of human nature, prudence, shrewdness, the power 
 of weighing evidence, is the main quality for the critic. 
 Learning gives weight and force ; it is indispensable. But 
 learning is as nothing, or as worse than nothing, unless sound 
 judgment stand above it. Sense, like charity in S. Paul's 
 exposition of the virtues, is the one and saving faculty 
 'though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, 
 though my memory is stored with the omne scibile, and I 
 have not common sense, I am become as sounding brass or a 
 tinkling cymbal.' Without this, erudition obscures the main 
 points at issue, and transforms the mirage of illusion into 
 momentary domes and towers. A sensible, unlettered girl 
 is a better critic than the learned simpleton who uses the 
 stores of a vast library to bolster up some baseless paradox. 
 Sense, in the region of criticism, is equivalent to imagination. 
 It enables its possessor to distinguish what is or may be from 
 what cannot be. 
 
 IX 
 
 The critical faculty may be described then as trained per- 
 ception in a man endowed with common sense and sound 
 imagination. This faculty may be exercised in every branch 
 of knowledge ; but for its particular display in any single 
 province we have to presuppose special qualifications (natural 
 and acquired, physical and mental), which enable the skilled 
 interpreter and judge to pronounce opinions with more 
 authority than the rest of mankind. A critic of music need 
 not be a critic of poetry ; nor do we seek enlightenment on 
 the art of painting from a judge of horseflesh. 
 
 Finally, the critic must beware of his subjective bias, and 
 keep himself resolutely in accord with the common wisdom
 
 78 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
 
 of humanity. No single wise man decides any question. A 
 consensus of wise men is needed to establish taste. He must 
 not suffer himself to be diverted by partialities and predilec- 
 tions into side-currents. His duty is to abide by commanding 
 principles, and, living in the whole, to appreciate the correla- 
 tion of the subject he has chosen with the complex of man's 
 intellectual and moral nature.
 
 THE PEOVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 ' ABT,' said Goethe, ' is but form -giving.' We might vary 
 this definition, and say, ' Art is a method of expression or 
 presentation.' Then comes the question : If art gives form, if 
 it is a method of expression or presentation, to what does it 
 give form, what does it express or present ? The answer 
 certainly must be : Art gives form to human consciousness ; 
 expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man. 
 Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication 
 of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the soften- 
 ing of manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, 
 this, at all events, is its prime function. 
 
 While investing thought and sentiment, the spiritual sub- 
 ject-matter of all art, with form, or finding for it proper modes 
 of presentation, each of the arts employs a special medium: 
 obeying the laws of beauty proper to that medium. The 
 vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are solid substances 
 (like ivory, stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words. 
 The masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation of 
 their characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded 
 as the craftsman's paramount concern. And in a certain 
 sense this is a right conclusion ; for dexterity in the manipu- 
 lation of the chosen vehicle, and power to create a beautiful 
 object, distinguish the successful artist from the man who 
 may have had like thoughts and feelings. This dexterity, this 
 power, are the properties of the artist, qud artist. Yet we 
 must not forget that the form created by the artist for the 
 expression of a thought or feeling is not the final end of art
 
 80 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 itself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation 
 through which the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, 
 in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the indis- 
 pensable condition under which the artistic manifestation of 
 the spiritual content must be made. It is the business of art 
 to create an ideal world, in which perception, emotion, under- 
 standing, action, all elements of human life sublimed by 
 thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This 
 being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should 
 not only estimate the technical skill of an artist and his 
 faculty for presenting beauty to the aesthetic sense, but that 
 we should also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit 
 he has chosen to invest with form, and how he has conceived 
 his subject. It is not necessary that the ideas embodied in 
 a work of art should be the artist's own. They may be 
 common to the race and age : as, for instance, the concep- 
 tion of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of 
 Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in 
 Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto. Still the personality of the 
 artist, his own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar 
 way of thinking and feeling, his individual attitude toward 
 the material given to him in ideas of human consciousness, 
 will modify his choice of subject and of form, and will 
 determine his specific type of beauty. To take an example : 
 supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is 
 given to the artist for treatment ; this will be the final end 
 of the work of art which he produces. But his personal 
 qualities and technical performance determine the degree of 
 success or failure to which he attains in seizing that idea 
 and in presenting it with beauty. Signorelli fails where 
 Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely form to the 
 religious sentiment. Michel Angelo is sure of the sublime, 
 and Raphael of the beautiful. 
 
 Art is thus the expression of the human spirit by the 
 artist to his fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is 
 commensurate with what man thinks and feels and does. It 
 is as deep as religion, as wide as life. But what distinguishes 
 art from religion or from life is, that this subject-matter must
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 81 
 
 assume beautiful form, and must be presented directly or 
 indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the 
 cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. 
 It does not teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract 
 enters into art's domain. Truth and goodness are trans- 
 muted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and 
 goodness assume the shape of truth, and in religion truth 
 and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, the 
 unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in 
 art. Whatever art has touched acquires a concrete sensuous 
 embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in art 
 have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence. It is 
 on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks 
 were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain 
 portions of the mediaeval Christian mythology lent themselves 
 so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics 
 of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, 
 in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. 
 Its secondary aim, after the prime end of manifesting the 
 human spirit in beautiful form has been accomplished, is to 
 give tranquil and innocent enjoyment. 
 
 II 
 
 From what has gone before, it will be seen that no 
 human being can make or mould a beautiful form without 
 incorporating in that form some portion of the human mind, 
 however crude, however elementary. In other words, there 
 is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without 
 a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, that 
 subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad 
 according as the subject has been well or ill presented, 
 consistently with the laws of beauty special to the art itself. 
 Thus we obtain two standards for sesthetic criticism. We 
 judge a statue, for example, both by the sculptor's intellectual 
 grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical skill and 
 sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment by 
 Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been 
 
 a
 
 82 THE PKOVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 more successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, 
 because the former has been better understood, although the 
 painter's skill in each is equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we 
 admire the sculptor's spirit, finish of execution, and originality 
 of design, while we deplore that want of sympathy with the 
 heroic character which makes his type of physical beauty 
 slightly vulgar and his facial expression vacuous. 
 
 If the phrase ' Art for art's sake ' has any meaning, this 
 meaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, 
 thinks exclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or 
 the quality of beauty. There are many inducements for the 
 artist thus to narrow his function, and for the critic to assist 
 him by applying the canons of a soulless connoisseurship 
 to his work ; for the conception of the subject is but the 
 starting-point in art-production, and the artist's difficulties 
 and triumphs as a craftsman lie in the region of technicalities. 
 He knows, moreover, that however deep or noble his idea 
 may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail in skill 
 or be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a 
 statue or a picture, is the form found for it ; and so the form 
 itself seems all-important. The artist, therefore, too easily 
 imagines that he may neglect his theme ; that a fine piece 
 of colouring, a well-balanced composition, or, as Cellini put 
 it, ' un bel corpo ignudo,' is enough. And this is especially 
 easy in an age which reflects much upon the arts, and 
 pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts and 
 sentiments are not of the kind which translate themselves 
 readily into artistic form. But, after all, a fine piece of 
 colouring, a well-balanced composition, a sonorous stanza, a 
 learned essay in counterpoint, are not enough. They are all 
 excellent good things, yielding delight to the artistic sense and 
 instruction to the student. Yet when we think of the really 
 great statues, pictures, poems, music of the world, we find 
 that these are really great because of something more and 
 that more is their theme, their presentation of a noble portion 
 of the human soul. Artists and art students may be satisfied 
 with perfect specimens of a craftsman's skill, independent 
 of his theme ; but the mass of men will not be satisfied ; and
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 88 
 
 it is as wrong to suppose that art exists for artists and 
 art-students, as to talk of art for art's sake. Art exists for 
 humanity. Art transmutes thought and feeling into terms 
 of beautiful form. Art is great and lasting in proportion as 
 it appeals to the human consciousness at large, presenting 
 to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was necessary in the first place firmly to apprehend 
 the truth that the final end of all art is the presentation 
 of a spiritual content ; it is necessary in the next place to 
 remove confusions by considering the special circumstances 
 of the several arts. 
 
 Each art has its own vehicle of expression. What it 
 can present and how it can present it, depends upon the 
 nature of this vehicle. Thus, though architecture, sculpture, 
 painting, music, poetry, meet upon the common ground of 
 spiritualised experience though the works of art produced 
 by the architect, sculptor, painter, musician, poet, emanate 
 from the spiritual nature of the race, are coloured by the 
 spiritual nature of the men who make them, and express 
 what is spiritual in humanity under concrete forms invented 
 for them by the artist yet it is certain that all of these arts 
 do not deal exactly with the same portions of this common 
 material in the same way or with the same results. Each 
 has its own department. Each exhibits qualities of strength 
 and weakness special to itself. To define these several 
 departments, to explain the relation of these several vehicles 
 of presentation to the common subject-matter, is the next 
 step in criticism. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of the fine arts, architecture alone subserves utility. We 
 build for use. But the geometrical proportions which the 
 architect observes contain the element of beauty and power- 
 fully influence the soul. Into the language of arch and aisle
 
 84 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 and colonnade, of cupola and fa9ade and pediment, of spire 
 and vault, the architect translates emotion, vague perhaps but 
 deep, mute but unmistakable. When we say that a building 
 is sublime or graceful, frivolous or stern, we mean that sub- 
 limity or grace, frivolity or sternness, is inherent in it. The 
 emotions connected with these qualities are inspired in us 
 when we contemplate it, and are presented to us by its form. 
 Whether the architect deliberately aimed at the sublime or 
 graceful whether the dignified serenity of the Athenian genius 
 sought to express itself in the Parthenon, and the mysticism 
 of mediaeval Christianity in the gloom of Chartres Cathedral 
 whether it was Renaissance paganism which gave its mun- 
 dane pomp and glory to S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness 
 of royalty its specious splendour to the palace of Versailles 
 need not be curiously questioned. The fact that we are im- 
 pelled to raise these points, that architecture more almost 
 than any art connects itself indissolubly with the life, the 
 character, the moral being of a nation and an epoch, proves 
 that we are justified in bringing it beneath our general defi- 
 nition of the arts. In a great measure because it subserves 
 utility, and is therefore dependent upon the necessities of life, 
 does architecture present to us through form the human spirit. 
 Comparing the palace built by Giulio Romano for the Dukes 
 of Mantua with the contemporary castle of a German prince, 
 we cannot fail at once to comprehend the difference of spiritual 
 conditions, as these displayed themselves in daily life, which 
 then separated Italy from the Teutonic nations. But this is 
 not all. Spiritual quality in the architect himself finds clear 
 expression in his work. Coldness combined with violence 
 marks Brunelleschi's churches ; a certain suavity and well- 
 bred taste the work of Bramante ; while Michel Angelo 
 exhibits wayward energy in his Library of S. Lorenzo, and 
 Amadeo self-abandonment to fancy in his Lombard chapels. 
 I have chosen examples from one nation and one epoch in 
 order that the point I seek to make, the demonstration of a 
 spiritual quality in buildings, may be fairly stated.
 
 THE PEOVINCES OF THE SEVEEAL ARTS 85 
 
 Sculpture and painting distinguish themselves from the 
 other fine arts by the imitation of concrete existences in 
 nature. They copy the bodies of men and animals, the 
 aspects of the world around us, and the handiwork of man- 
 kind. Yet, in so far as they are rightly arts, they do not 
 make imitation an object in itself. The grapes of Zeuxis at 
 which birds pecked, the painted dog at which a cat's hair 
 bristles if such grapes or such a dog were ever put on 
 canvas are but evidences of the artist's skill, not of his 
 faculty as artist. These two plastic, or, as I prefer to call 
 them, figurative arts, use their imitation of the external 
 world for the expression, the presentation of internal, spiritual 
 things. The human form is for them the outward symbol of 
 the inner human spirit, and their power of presenting spirit is 
 limited by the means at their disposal. 
 
 Sculpture employs stone, wood, clay, the precious metals, 
 to model forms, detached and independent, or raised upon 
 a flat surface in relief. Its domain is the whole range of 
 human character and consciousness, in so far as these can 
 be indicated by fixed facial expression, by physical type, and 
 by attitude. If we dwell for an instant on the greatest his- 
 torical epoch of sculpture, we shall understand the domain 
 of this art in its range and limitation. At a certain point 
 of Greek development the Hellenic Pantheon began to be 
 translated by the sculptors into statues : and when the genius 
 of the Greeks expired in Home, the cycle of their psycho- 
 logical conceptions had been exhaustively presented through 
 this medium. During that long period of time, the most 
 delicate gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, 
 were submitted to the contemplation of the consciousness 
 which gave them being, in appropriate types. Strength and 
 swiftness, massive force and airy lightness, contemplative 
 repose and active energy, voluptuous softness and refined 
 grace, intellectual sublimity and lascivious seductiveness the 
 whole rhythm of qualities which can be typified by bodily 
 form were analysed, selected, combined in various degrees,
 
 86 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 to incarnate the religious conceptions of Zeus, Aphrodite, 
 Herakles, Dionysus, Pallas, Fauns and Satyrs, Nymphs of 
 woods and waves, Tritons, the genius of Death, heroes and 
 hunters, lawgivers and poets, presiding deities of minor 
 functions, man's lustful appetites and sensual needs. All 
 that men think, or do, or are, or wish for, or imagine in 
 this world, had found exact corporeal equivalents. Not 
 physiognomy alone, but all the portions of the body upon 
 which the habits of the animating soul are wont to stamp 
 themselves, were studied and employed as symbolism. Uranian 
 Aphrodite was distinguished from her Pandemic sister by 
 chastened, lust-repelling loveliness. The muscles of Herakles 
 were more ponderous than the tense sinews of Achilles. The 
 Hermes of the palaestra bore a torso of majestic depth ; the 
 Hermes who carried messages from heaven had limbs alert 
 for movement. The brows of Zeus inspired awe ; the breasts 
 of Dionysus breathed delight. 
 
 A race accustomed, as the Greeks were, to read this 
 symbolism, accustomed, as the Greeks were, to note the 
 individuality of naked form, had no difficulty in interpreting 
 the language of sculpture. Nor is there even now much 
 difficulty in the task. Our surest guide to the subject of a 
 bas-relief or statue is study of the physical type considered as 
 symbolical of spiritual quality. From the fragment of a torso 
 the true critic can say whether it belongs to the athletic or 
 the erotic species. A limb of Bacchus differs from a limb of 
 Poseidon. The whole psychological conception of Aphrodite 
 Pandemos enters into every muscle, every joint, no less than 
 into her physiognomy, her hair, her attitude. 
 
 There is, however, a limit to the domain of sculpture. This 
 art deals most successfully with personified generalities. It 
 is also strong in the presentation of incarnate character. But 
 when it attempts to tell a story, we often seek in vain its 
 meaning. Battles of Amazons or Centaurs upon bas-reliefs, 
 indeed, are unmistakable. The subject is indicated here by 
 some external sign. The group of Laocoon appeals at once 
 to a reader of Virgil, and the divine vengeance of Leto's 
 children upon Niobe is manifest in the Uffizzi marbles. But
 
 THE PKOVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 87 
 
 who are the several heroes of the .-Eginetan pediment, 
 and what was the subject of the Pheidian statues on the 
 Parthenon? Do the three graceful figures of a bas-relief 
 which exists at Naples and in the Villa Albani, represent 
 Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, or Antiope and her two 
 sons ? Was the winged and sworded genius upon the Ephesus 
 column meant for a genius of Death or a genius of Love ? 
 
 This dimness of significance indicates the limitation of 
 sculpture, and inclines some of those who feel its charm to 
 assert that the sculptor seeks to convey no intellectual mean- 
 ing, that he is satisfied with the creation of beautiful form. 
 There is an element of good sense in this revolt against the 
 faith which holds that art is nothing but a mode of spiritual 
 presentation. Truly the artist aims at producing beauty, is 
 satisfied if he conveys delight. But it is impossible to escape 
 from the certainty that, while he is creating forms of beauty, 
 he means something, feels something; and that something, 
 that theme for which he finds the form, is part of the world's 
 spiritual heritage. Only the crudest works of figurative art, 
 capricci and arabesques, have no intellectual content ; and 
 even these are good in so far as they convey the playfulness 
 of fancy. 
 
 VI 
 
 Painting employs colours upon surfaces walls, panels, 
 canvas. What has been said about sculpture will apply in a 
 great measure to this art. The human form, the world around 
 us, the works of man's hands, are represented in painting, not 
 for their own sake merely, but with the view of bringing 
 thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the 
 spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have 
 been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculp- 
 ture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest 
 thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play> 
 like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is 
 deficient in the fulness and roundness of concrete reality. A 
 statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in palpable form, 
 fixed and frozen for eternity. The picture is a reflection cast
 
 88 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 upon a magic glass; not less permanent, but reduced to a 
 shadow of palpable reality. To follow these distinctions 
 farther would be alien from the present purpose. It is enough 
 to repeat that, within their several spheres, according to their 
 several strengths and weaknesses, both sculpture and painting 
 present the spirit to us only as the spirit shows itself immersed 
 in things of sense. The light of a lamp enclosed within an 
 alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn of lustre and 
 toned to coloured softness. Even thus the spirit, immersed 
 in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is 
 still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and 
 invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster 
 form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render 
 it transparent, is the artist's function. But he will have failed 
 of the highest if the light within burns dim, or if he gives the 
 world a lamp in which no spiritual flame is lighted. 
 
 VII 
 
 Music transports us to a different region. Like architec- 
 ture, it imitates nothing. It uses pure sound, and sound of 
 the most wholly artificial kind so artificial that the musical 
 sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore unintelligible, 
 to another. Like architecture, music relies upon mathematical 
 proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility. It 
 is the purest art of pleasure the truest paradise and play- 
 ground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even 
 less power than sculpture, to tell a story or to communicate 
 an idea. For we must remember that when music is married 
 to words, the words, and not the music, reach our thinking 
 faculty. And yet, in spite of all this, music presents man's 
 spirit to itself through form. The domain of the spirit over 
 which music reigns, is emotion not defined emotion, not 
 feeling even so generally defined as jealousy or anger but 
 those broad bases of man's being out of which emotions 
 spring, defining themselves through action into this or that 
 set type of feeling. Architecture, we have noticed, is so con- 
 nected with specific modes of human existence, that from its
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 89 
 
 main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who used 
 it. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to 
 the imitation of external things, have all the help which 
 experience and association render. The mere artificiality of 
 music's vehicle separates it from life and makes its message 
 untranslatable. Nevertheless, this very disability under which 
 it labours is the secret of its extraordinary potency. 
 
 To expect clear definition from music the definition which 
 belongs to poetry would be absurd. The sphere of music is 
 in sensuous perception ; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. 
 Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in 
 significance than poetry, which deals with words. Never- 
 theless its effect upon the sentient subject may be more 
 intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot 
 fail to understand what words are intended to convey ; we 
 may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the 
 message of sound. But this is not because words are wider 
 in their reach and more alive ; rather because they are more 
 limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise some- 
 thing precise and unmistakable ; but this precision is itself 
 attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value 
 of the counter is better understood when it is a word than 
 when it is a chord, because all that a word conveys has 
 already become a thought, while all that musical sounds 
 convey remains within the region of emotion which has not 
 been intellectualised. 1 Poetry touches emotion through the 
 thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at 
 all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has 
 become thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and 
 has taken to itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore 
 the message of music can never rightly be translated into 
 words. It is the very largeness and vividness of the sphere 
 of simple feeling which makes its symbolical counterpart in 
 sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this incontestable 
 defect of seeming vagueness, an emotion expressed by music 
 is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, 
 
 1 ' Thought,' said Novalis somewhere, ' is only a pale, desiccated 
 emotion.'
 
 90 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 than the same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, 
 it is more immediate, as compensation for being less 
 intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, 
 an indistinct, where each consciousness defines and sets a 
 limitary form. 
 
 Nothing intervenes between the musical work of art and 
 the fibres of the sentient being it immediately thrills. We do 
 not seek to say what music means. We feel the music. And 
 if a man should pretend that the music has not passed beyond 
 his ears, has communicated nothing but a musical delight, he 
 simply tells us that he has not felt music. The ancients on 
 this point were wiser than some moderns when, without 
 pretending to assign an intellectual significance to music, they 
 held for an axiom that one type of music bred one type of 
 character, another type another. A change in the music of 
 a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by changes in its con- 
 stitution. It is of the utmost importance, said Aristotle, to 
 provide in education for the use of the ennobling and the 
 fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music 
 creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and 
 move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vague- 
 ness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of 
 music. A melody occurs to the composer, which he certainly 
 connects with no act of the reason, which he is probably 
 unconscious of connecting with any movement of his feeling, 
 but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional 
 mood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus 
 impromptu, he is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that 
 this work has correspondence with emotion. Beethoven calls 
 one symphony Heroic, another Pastoral ; of the opening of 
 another he says, 'Fate knocks at the door.' Mozart sets comic 
 words to the mass-music of a friend, in order to mark his 
 sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment. All composers 
 use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, Con 
 Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their 
 music ought to represent.
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 91 
 
 VIII 
 
 Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and 
 consider two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any 
 system of aesthetics. These are dancing and acting. Dancing 
 uses the living human form, and presents feeling or action, 
 the passions and the deeds of men, in artificially educated 
 movements of the body. The element of beauty it possesses, 
 independently of the beauty of the dancer, is rhythm. Acting 
 or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no 
 longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm, but as an ideal 
 reproduction of reality. The actor is what he represents, and 
 the element of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation. 
 It is his duty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, 
 not perhaps exactly as Othello and Orestes were, but as the 
 essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought 
 to be. The actor can do this in dumb show. Some of the 
 greatest actors of the ancient world were mimes. But he 
 usually interprets a poet's thought, and attempts to present 
 an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which has 
 for its advantage his own personality in play. 
 
 IX 
 
 The last of the fine arts is literature ; or, in the narrower 
 sphere of which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. 
 Poetry employs words in fixed rhythms, which we call metres. 
 Only a small portion of its effect is derived from the beauty 
 of its sound. It appeals to the sense of hearing far less 
 immediately than music does. It makes no appeal to the 
 eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour. It 
 produces no palpable, tangible object. But language being 
 the storehouse of all human experience, language being the 
 medium whereby spirit communicates with spirit in affairs of 
 life, the vehicle which transmits to us the thoughts and feel- 
 ings of the past, and on which we rely for continuing our 
 present to the future, it follows that, of all the arts, poetry 
 soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home in the region
 
 92 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 of the spirit. What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it 
 more than balances by intellectual intensity. Its significance 
 is unmistakable, because it employs the very material men 
 use in their exchange of thoughts and correspondence of 
 emotions. To the bounds of its empire there is no end. It 
 embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts. By 
 words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, 
 painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts. 
 Philosophy finds place in poetry ; and life itself, refined to 
 its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins 
 our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the 
 realms where unattainable and imperceptible will have no 
 meaning. 
 
 If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the 
 human spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more 
 incontestably than any other art, fulfils this definition and 
 enables us to gauge its accuracy. For words are the spirit, 
 manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry 
 is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all 
 that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find 
 in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry 
 their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no longer 
 puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of 
 necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry 
 whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort : good 
 or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, 
 noble or ignoble, slight or weighty such distinctions do 
 not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether 
 the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. 
 Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find 
 melody quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a 
 Venetian picture meaningless) is a contradiction in terms. 
 In poetry, life, or a portion of life, lives again, resus- 
 citated and presented to our mental faculty through art. 
 The best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life, 
 or its intensest moments. Therefore the extensive species 
 of the drama and the epic, the intensive species of the 
 lyric, have been ever held in highest esteem. Only a para-
 
 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 93 
 
 doxical critic maintains the thesis that poetry is excellent 
 in so far as it assimilates the vagueness of music, or esti- 
 mates a poet by his power of translating sense upon the 
 border-land of nonsense into melodious words. Where poetry 
 falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in the 
 quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concrete- 
 ness. Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye 
 and to the intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses 
 by indirect suggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most 
 complicated kind of poetry, relies upon the actor ; and lyrical 
 poetry, the intensest kind of poetry, seeks the aid of music. 
 But these comparative deficiencies are overbalanced, for all 
 the highest purposes of art, by the width and depth, the 
 intelligibility and power, the flexibility and multitudinous 
 associations of language. The other arts are limited in what 
 they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life 
 of man which poetry cannot express. Poetry says everything 
 in man's own language to the mind. The other arts appeal 
 imperatively, each in its own region, to man's senses ; and 
 the mind receives art's message by the help of symbols from 
 the world of sense. Poetry lacks this immediate appeal 
 to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its 
 quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts through 
 intellectual perception upon all the faculties that make men 
 what they are. 
 
 X 
 
 I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to 
 indicate the presence of the vital spirit, the essential element 
 of thought or feeling, in the work of art. I said it radiated 
 through the form, as lamplight through an alabaster vase. 
 Now the skill of the artist is displayed in modelling that 
 vase, in giving it shape, rich and rare, and fashioning its 
 curves with subtlest workmanship. In so far as he is a 
 craftsman, the artist's pains must be bestowed upon this 
 precious vessel of the animating theme. In so far as he has 
 power over beauty, he must exert it in this plastic act. It 
 is here that he displays dexterity ; here that he creates ; here
 
 94 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 
 
 that he separates himself from other men who think and feel. 
 The poet, more perhaps than any other artist, needs to keep 
 this steadily in view; for words being our daily vehicle of 
 utterance, it may well chance that the alabaster vase of 
 language should be hastily or trivially modelled. This is the 
 true reason why 'neither gods nor men nor the columns 
 either suffer mediocrity in singers.' Upon the poet it is 
 specially incumbent to see that he has something rare to 
 say and some rich mode of saying it. The figurative arts 
 need hardly be so cautioned. They run their risk in quite 
 a different direction. For sculptor and for painter, the danger 
 is lest he should think that alabaster vase his final task. He 
 may too easily be satisfied with moulding a beautiful but 
 empty form.
 
 ON THE KELATION OF AKT TO SCIENCE AND 
 MOEALITY 
 
 THE most singular phenomenon of language in its relation 
 to thought is our inability to define the words expressive 
 of ideas by which we are principally influenced in life. We 
 cannot make satisfactory definitions of God, goodness, truth, 
 beauty, poetry, love. The prudent man abstains from 
 definitions in such cases, feeling sure that his audience, if 
 they are capable of listening to his argument, will be 
 provided with general notions sufficient to make his meaning 
 clear. 
 
 Perhaps the reason why no satisfactory definitions can 
 be given of goodness, beauty, truth, is that these ideas blend 
 in our spiritual nature, so that, when we seek to distinguish 
 them, we violate the unity of our higher self. 
 
 Yet a man may be permitted at times to play this 
 impossible game of definitions as a kind of intellectual 
 pastime, recognising its inefficiency, but acknowledging 
 suggestive and stimulative value in the sport. 
 
 We may say, for instance, that goodness is the quality in 
 things and living creatures which makes them perfect in their 
 several kinds, and adapts them to their special functions. It 
 is a quality of essence. 
 
 We may say that beauty is the quality in things and 
 living creatures which makes them delightful to our sensi- 
 bility. It is inseparable from some mode of presentation. It 
 is a quality, not of essence, but of aspect and appearance. 
 
 We may say that truth is conformity to what is actual
 
 96 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 and capable of demonstration ; or subjectively, that is the 
 exact apprehension by our mind of facts as they really are, 
 whether these be good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It is a 
 quality, not of aspect, but of essence. 
 
 Still we know that there is no beauty worthy of the name 
 without truth and without a certain sort of goodness. We 
 feel that goodness is the highest kind of truth, and that 
 truth is good. We recognise that every truth, once demon- 
 strated has a right to be called beautiful. It is only needful 
 to fix attention on the contrary ideas of badness, ugliness, 
 falsity, in order to perceive that their intrusion into the 
 sphere of the good, the beautiful, the true, vitiates our radical 
 conception of those virtues. Beauty cannot be bad ; goodness 
 cannot be false ; truth cannot be ugly and so on, ringing all 
 the changes on their combinations. 
 
 From the most abstract point of view, goodness, beauty, 
 truth are in reality inseparable. Religion presents us with an 
 ideal of the universal Being, in whom they co-exist without 
 one flaw or note of difference. This is religion's way of 
 presenting to our minds the ideal unity of our own nature, 
 the type of self to which humanity aspires. 
 
 But we immediately divide them in our understanding. 
 It is the function of the intelligence to decompose abstrac- 
 tions. Intelligence deals with concrete things ; and the 
 concrete is always the differentiated. Thus we use the word 
 good in different senses. We speak, for instance, of good iron, 
 a good horse, good beef ; but we reserve the name goodness 
 for the dominant excellence of human beings, moral virtue. 
 To this quality we assign ethics ; to truth, science ; to beauty, 
 aesthetics. 
 
 In ethics, right conduct is good in itself, beautiful to the 
 imagination, true to our apprehension of permanent relations. 
 In aesthetics, a fine work of art is beautiful to the percipient 
 sense, good by its thoroughness of execution, true by 
 exactitude of delineation. In science, a theory is true because 
 it accounts for the facts and is capable of demonstration, 
 beautiful by reason of its lucidity, good because it can be 
 depended on and fulfils its purpose.
 
 TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 97 
 
 So far we may apply the terms of each province to the 
 subject-matter of the others. This must not, however, blind 
 us to the fact that morality, art, and science which are 
 severally concerned with goodness, beauty, and truth require 
 to be considered separately. Each exists for itself, notwith- 
 standing those reciprocal affinities, to which language testifies, 
 and which are deeply grounded in our nature. Thus morality 
 holds up for admiration many things which we recognise 
 as essentially good, but which can only be called beautiful 
 by a metaphor such as suffering a horrid death for con- 
 science' sake or the discharge of distasteful duties. Art, 
 on the contrary, may produce forms which are physically 
 beautiful, but which stimulate appetites or suggest thoughts 
 alien to moral Tightness. Science, again, is indifferent alike 
 to beauty and to moral goodness. It seeks the law of 
 ugliness, disease, and crime, no less than the law of beauty, 
 health, and virtue. Their ends in like manner differ. Morality 
 tends to right conduct, art to noble pleasure, science to know- 
 ledge and control of facts. Of the three, morality is by far 
 the most complex, because it is concerned with nothing less 
 than the whole nature of man ourselves the most vitally 
 important, and also the most inscrutable matter for inquiry. 
 For the same reason it is also the most undetermined of the 
 three ; in its province nothing has, as yet, been reduced to 
 the certainty of law. Therefore it relies on religion for the 
 sanction, and on jurisprudence for the enforcement, of its 
 ruling principles. Standing in a certain sense between science 
 and art, it derives information from the former, and exercises 
 supervision over the latter. And forasmuch as right conduct 
 is more precious to man than either noble pleasure or the 
 knowledge and control of facts, morality has to provide that 
 neither the scientific pursuit of knowledge nor the aesthetical 
 supply of pleasure shall compromise the rectitude of the will 
 in action. Morality, in fact, as Aristotle said long ago, is 
 architectonic ; and goodness, for human nature, is the queen 
 over truth and beauty.
 
 98 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 II 
 
 At the end of His seven days' labour of creation, ' God 
 saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very 
 good.' It was not good for nothing, nor merely good for some- 
 thing, but good in itself, as corresponding to its destined ends 
 and uses. This goodness of the world included and implied 
 its truth and beauty also. For the infinite mind it was 
 enough to call the world by that noblest name of good. But 
 man's understanding acts like a prism, which breaks white 
 light into its component colours. We are obliged to regard 
 the outer world from theoretically separate points of view. 
 We look at things (1) in themselves, (2) in their aspects and 
 appearances, (3) in their relation to utility and purpose, (4) in 
 their relation to conduct. The attempt to ascertain what they 
 are leads to science. The attempt to seize their aspects and 
 appearances leads to art. When we consider their qualities 
 with reference to use and purpose, this calls into action 
 practical wisdom. Viewed from the point of view of conduct, 
 they suggest morality. A similar process of disintegration, 
 due to man's partial power of mental vision, may be traced 
 in our ways of dealing with the inner world of our own selves. 
 Psychology scrutinises the phenomena of mind without refer- 
 ence to conduct. Morality erects standards of duty and of 
 social utility ; it is not content with facts and phenomena ; 
 it sees them in relation to ulterior ends. Art regards physical 
 form, the aspects of human action, the appearances of passion 
 and emotion ; it does not care for scientific explanations of 
 what and how and why ; it is not primarily concerned with 
 moral quality ; it is content with impressions and the pre- 
 sentation of impressions. 
 
 Many things are beautiful in art which morality condemns, 
 which have no practical utility, which science passes over in a 
 sentence of three words. Many things are morally admirable, 
 practically valuable, scientifically of enthralling interest, which 
 leave art cold, indifferent, disdainful. Art is the expression 
 of man's delight in nature and his sympathy with human joys 
 and sufferings. Science is the expression of man's curiosity,
 
 99 
 
 the outcome of his analytical investigation. Practical wisdom 
 is the expression of man's will and power to utilise things in 
 his own interest. Morality is the expression of man's self- 
 consciousness and judgment as to the right and wrong of 
 conduct, governed by subjective qualities inherent in a race 
 or epoch. 
 
 Reality, and consequently truth, is involved in all these 
 several ways of regarding the outer and the inner world. The 
 aspects and appearances of things, their practical utilities and 
 values, their ethical and social relations, are no less facts for 
 us than are their essence, component elements, manners of 
 behaviour. But science has primarily to do with things as 
 they are, art with their aspects and appearances, practical 
 wisdom with their utilities, morality with their relation to the 
 spiritual organism. It is because we cannot see the whole at 
 once that we divide in this way. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Art, which deals mainly with aspects and appearances, and 
 which aims at noble pleasure, has a special duty to be mindful 
 of the admonitions given by her sisters. She seeks to present 
 the outer and the inner worlds to human sensibilities ; she 
 must do this truthfully, she must do it wholesomely, at the 
 risk of wounding or insulting sensibility. She claims to 
 reveal new joys ; she brings to light permanent and inex- 
 haustible treasures of loveliness, which the material universe 
 and the soul of man contain, but which elude the eyes of 
 those who have not caught their aspects in her magic mirror. 
 How can she fulfil this function if she sees falsely or feels 
 basely? The more we reflect, the more are we led to 
 the conviction that art cannot neglect the correspondences 
 between beauty and truth, beauty and goodness, beauty and 
 use. The more we drive issues to their ultimate conclusion, 
 the more clear will it appear that beauty, which deserves that 
 name, cannot exist without truth, goodness, serviceable 
 quality. In proportion as beauty includes these elements, 
 it is vigorous, enduring, vital, universal, for all tunes and 
 
 H 2
 
 100 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 nations. In proportion as it excludes them, it is illusory, 
 phantasmal, perishable, partial to a race or moment. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that art, through 
 this appeal to sensibility, no less than through the pursuit of 
 pleasure as an aim, contains an element of weakness, from 
 which morality and science are free. There are ignoble 
 pleasures, and sensibility is sometimes morbid. Art, if she 
 chooses, can provide the former and can gratify the latter, 
 without quitting the domain of beauty. She can turn herself 
 at will from an Egeria or a Pythia into a Circe or a Siren. 
 
 Art, again, has nothing in herself to discipline the moral 
 nature of her servants. They bring to her the spirits which 
 they had, and she responds to them or fails to touch them. 
 
 A great artist never works from a consciously scientific or 
 a consciously ethical point of view. He has no didactic pur- 
 pose ; he does not aim at proving anything. He is satisfied 
 with making something ; and this something may be of very 
 various sorts in regard to truth and goodness. It remains 
 certain, however, that he is unable to make anything without 
 exercising the spirit which is in him ; and this spirit involves 
 principles which are proper to both science and morality. 
 
 Architecture, to begin with, rests upon geometrical propor- 
 tions. Music, which Sir Thomas Browne styled ' a sensible 
 fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of 
 God,' is dependent upon mathematical ratios. The figurative 
 arts seek after correctness of design, correctness of perspec- 
 tive, correctness of tone. They need truth of delineation, 
 ' conformity to what is real,' ' exact apprehension of facts.' 
 So far as they are imitative, veracity is one of their cardinal 
 virtues. To this extent, then, art partakes of the scientific 
 spirit. 
 
 When we come to consider the function of the arts in 
 history, their social and educational importance, together with 
 the thoughts and feelings they express, the point of contact 
 between them and morality is even more apparent. I have 
 elsewhere insisted on the fact that no work of art is abso- 
 lutely unqualified by moral tone of one sort or another, seeing 
 that all such works are the products of a moralised person-
 
 TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 101 
 
 ality. The mode of handling and treatment, what we call 
 style, communicates, dimly perhaps, but certainly, something 
 from the artist's nature to the sensibility of the percipient. 
 The same face painted by Greuze, Raphael, and Lionardo da 
 Vinci would affect us with very different sentiments. The 
 same torso modelled by Pheidias, Cellini, Gian Bologna, and 
 Michel Angelo would awake widely dissimilar sensations. 
 The same musical theme handled by Mozart, Cherubini, 
 Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Rossini would transport us into 
 diverse regions of emotion. Thus, at the very beginning of the 
 matter, each artist exercises a specific moral influence, without 
 deliberate intention, by the mere display of personality. 
 
 If we proceed further, and regard the subject-matter of the 
 arts, this connection with morality becomes still more marked- 
 Except in purely decorative work, art cannot escape from con- 
 veying a meaning of some sort. It may therefore be used, 
 and it has been used, to inculcate religion and to stimulate 
 licentiousness, to exhibit the strength of heroes and the con- 
 stancy of martyrs, to reveal the seductions of the senses or 
 the poignant fascination of bloodthirsty passions. We need 
 hardly mention poetry in this discussion ; for poetry, by its 
 command of words, embraces the whole sphere of human 
 nature. Not only all the acts of men and women, but all 
 their thoughts and emotions, their aspirations toward a 
 better state of being, their affinities with brutes, their capa- 
 city to sink below the brutes into devildom, belong to verbal 
 expression. For this reason Milton regarded poetry as the 
 fundamental instrument in education. Logic and rhetoric, 
 he observes, have their important place in mental training ; 
 'to which poetry should be made subsequent, or indeed 
 rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more 
 simple, sensuous, and passionate.' Poetry, to quote another 
 phrase from Milton, ' with a solid and treatable smoothness 
 points out and describes ' whatsoever is presented in abstract 
 form by theology, philosophy, history, logic, and rhetoric. 
 From poetry, therefore, through its simplicity, its sensuous 
 fulness, and its passionate appeal, commanding moral im- 
 pressions for good or evil have to be expected. But enough
 
 102 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 has been already said upon this topic in another essay. It 
 is more to the present purpose to point out that even those 
 arts which seem most widely removed from life exert their 
 toning influence upon the moral consciousness. 
 
 Music, for example, inculcates nothing, tells no story, utters 
 no propositions which provoke assent or dissent. Yet music, 
 in spite of the insidious vagueness of its language, in spite 
 of the fact that its influences are rarely seized or analysed, 
 has a potent charm for tuning our susceptibilities to divers 
 issues. Few of those who have read Plato will dispute what 
 he records about the tonic value of the Dorian mood, as 
 compared with the enervation of the Mixo-Lydian and the 
 frenzy of the Phrygian. To demur that we have only vague 
 notions about the Greek moods avails nothing. A fugue of 
 Bach or the choruses of Israel in Egypt, Rossini's melodies 
 and Strauss's valses, the overture to Tannhauser and the 
 pibroch of a Highland clan such terms of comparison will 
 suit our purpose just as well as those implied in the obscure 
 phraseology of antique writers on Greek music. Dryden 
 seized the truth and roughly expressed it in his ode for St. 
 Cecilia's Day, styled ' Alexander's Feast.' 
 
 Architecture, again, teaches nothing, tells no story, offers 
 no allurements to the senses, imitates nothing. Such 
 immediate appeals to the sensibilities it leaves to the 
 figurative arts. Yet men and women who are susceptible 
 to their surroundings cannot fail to be toned to different 
 moods, according as they dwell habitually in a Gothic 
 castle, in a Genoese palace, or in a rococo villa of the 
 Regency according as they worship habitually in Chartres 
 Cathedral, in a Jesuit church with its gimcracks, or in an 
 English Methodist chapel with its arid grimness. I admit 
 that it is easy to over-estimate the possible influence of these 
 material environments. Some people seem unimpressible by 
 them. Yet experience leads me to think that there are numerous 
 human beings in each nation who do receive powerful and 
 permanent tone from the impressions communicated to them 
 by architecture. 
 
 Something similar to Seneca's remark on landscape and
 
 TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 103 
 
 climate holds good here. ' Effeminat animos amoenitas nimia, 
 nee dubie aliquid ad corrumpendum vigorem potest regio. 
 Non tantum corpori sed etiam moribus salubrem locum eligere 
 debemus.' ' Excessive delightfulness emasculates our mental 
 disposition ; nor is there any doubt that the place we live in 
 can do something to undermine the vital forces. Not merely 
 for our body, but also for our moral character, we ought to 
 select a wholesome residence.' 
 
 IV 
 
 The conclusion we thus reach is that if art, on its formal 
 and technical side, partakes of the scientific spirit in all that 
 concerns its mental content and influence upon our nature, it 
 no less certainly partakes of the ethical spirit. Yet art has 
 its privileges and rights and independence. It is not really a 
 sub-species of Science, nor is it really a sub-species of Ethic. 
 To describe it by such terms would be to strain language and 
 to confuse thought. 
 
 All that we are justified in saying on this point is that art 
 cannot ignore morality, any more than it can ignore truth. 
 To claim unqualified independence for it would show a radical 
 misconception of its nature. 
 
 It would be still more foolish to maintain that vice is the 
 natural soil of artistic genius, or the manure which stimulates 
 it to productive energy. Owing to the primal cult of beauty, 
 the method of sensuous presentation, and the purpose of 
 communicating pleasure, which we have recognised as proper 
 to art owing to these conditions of its being, art may indeed 
 appear to have little or nothing to do with virtue ; and there 
 have undoubtedly been periods of the world's history when 
 it has flourished in the midst of much licentiousness. 
 
 The Italian Renaissance was one of these periods. A 
 thorough-going inquiry into all the aspects of that complex 
 era exposes the historian to misconception. He has to face 
 the reproach of regarding art and beauty as flowers of vice 
 and corruption, simply because he dwells upon the patent 
 fact that Italy reached her highest point of artistic develop-
 
 104 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 ment at a time when political institutions were decaying, 
 social morality was deteriorating, and religious emotions were 
 refrigerating. There is no denying this fact ; and in con- 
 sidering the relation of the arts to ethics, it ought to be taken 
 into account. Art of a certain sort can indubitably prosper 
 under conditions which are not favourable to personal or 
 national morality. 
 
 Yet, if we look somewhat more narrowly into the factors 
 of this problem, we shall discover that in Italy there existed 
 no casual link between moral enfeeblement and aesthetic 
 vigour. On the contrary, the best work of that brilliant period 
 was accomplished during years which still retained the glow 
 of mediffival faith and the verve of republican enthusiasm. 
 What survived of force and goodness in the nation, not the 
 insidious encroachments of vice and pusillanimity, enabled 
 painting to flourish between Giotto and Buonarroti. It was 
 the robust science and the desperate patriotism of Machiavelli, 
 not his disbelief in human excellence and his paradoxical con- 
 ception of political craft, which gave lustre to the ' Principe,' 
 the ' History of Florence,' and the ' Discourses upon Livy.' 
 A little later, Italy, debauched by luxury, degraded in her 
 own eyes by foreign conquest, numbed by the torpor of the 
 Catholic Reaction, ceased to produce even respectable pictures, 
 neglected the culture she had created for Europe, allowed her 
 printing-presses to stand idle, and drowned her literature in 
 floods of academical rhetoric. 
 
 In addition to this, signs are not wanting in the Italian 
 art of the Renaissance period which confirm us in believing 
 that great and lasting monuments of human genius imply a 
 sterling moral temper in their makers. After all accounts 
 are reckoned, Dante remains unique among Italians, the one 
 supreme poet of his race. Boccaccio's licentiousness, which 
 leavens and gives form to Renaissance poetry and fiction, 
 condemned that voluminous literature, with the single excep- 
 tion of the ' Orlando Furioso,' to artistic mediocrity. Not 
 merely because they are immoral, but because they are not 
 really first-rate of their kind, we could afford to abandon the 
 narrative poems and novels of the Renaissance without a sigh.
 
 TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 105 
 
 Posterity has already consigned to oblivion the rhetorical 
 compositions of the Humanists, the odes and sonnets of 
 Academical craftsmen. We note with curiosity and wonder 
 that, after Petrarch, few tolerable lyrics were composed by 
 Italians ; that the nation proved itself incapable of tragedy ; 
 that it could not, in spite of all its efforts, produce an 
 epic. It has been my duty to read thousands of Renaissance 
 compositions, in all kinds of verse; but I would barter the 
 myriad polished lines of Bembo, Molza, Sannazzarro, and the 
 rest of that sort, for a few rough stanzas of Michel Angelo 
 and Campanella, Why is this ? Not because the former 
 are vicious and the latter virtuous ; it would indeed be 
 difficult to prove that indictment ; but because Michel 
 Angelo and Campanella were men of forcible character, 
 and wrote what is profitable to men in all ages : and of 
 such men there was a lamentable lack in Italy, owing to 
 her ethical deterioration. 
 
 So far as it goes, then, the instance of the Italian Renais- 
 sance tends to establish the position that noble art is only 
 compatible with sound morality. But there is another point 
 of view from which the seeming paradox of that epoch has to 
 be regarded. Its eminent art was mainly plastic not literary, 
 but pictorial, sculpturesque, with multiform expansion into 
 minor channels of utility and service, as in house-building, 
 furniture, plate, armour, weapons, woodwork, decorative 
 embroideries, medals, glass, mosaic, enamel, pottery, and so 
 forth. This kind of art, unlike poetry, is only remotely 
 connected with ideas ; and the refinement it implies is not 
 inconsistent with barbarity, with profligacy, with political 
 decadence. Granting, then, that the Italians were cruel, 
 cunning, licentious, incapable of warfare, rotten in their public 
 and private morality ignoring, for the sake of argument, 
 their profound diplomatical ability, their formation of a new 
 intellectual ideal for Europe, their ecclesiastical predominance 
 in the councils of Catholic Christendom, their inauguration of 
 the modern scientific method riveting our eyes solely on the 
 fact that art flourished among them at a time when social 
 morality, religion, and patriotism had been weakened we
 
 106 ON THE RELATION OF ART 
 
 shall not be surprised to find that it was not great poetry, nor 
 yet great literature of any kind, but such plastic art as I have 
 described which rose to the highest eminence among them. 
 I, for one, am unable to believe that the glory of their plastic 
 and technical art, unrivalled as it is in modern days, could 
 have been attained without noble qualities in the nation. It 
 is my deliberate opinion that so vigorous a manifestation of 
 the human spirit is impossible in wholly somnolent or 
 putrescent stages of the human consciousness. In spite, 
 therefore, of public and private immorality, apparent on the 
 surface of the nation at that period, there must have been 
 present solid and splendid virtues also, if not precisely virtues 
 of the sort which men of our epoch are wont to praise. 
 
 When we regard Italian society during the years when this 
 art flourished, we shall find that it lacked cohesion, but that 
 it abounded in salient personalities. It had not the force and 
 toughness of an organised state. On the other hand, it was 
 not animated with a religious enthusiasm, like Islam in its 
 epoch of expansion. Yet it bred individuals of Cellini's stamp, 
 captains like Giovanni de' Medici and the Strozzi, popes of 
 the calibre of Julius II., scholars as world-famous as Poliziano, 
 thinkers like Bruno and Sarpi, despots of the force of Cosimo 
 de' Medici, saint-like souls of the purity of Carlo Borromeo 
 and Filippo Neri, gentlemen fit to rank with Castiglione, well- 
 tempered spirits of the kith of Contarini, free-lances of the 
 intellect as keen as Aretino. It bred them, not singly, but by 
 hundreds. The atmosphere in which thought lived and moved 
 and had its being was aswarm with them. That atmosphere, 
 uncondensed indeed into a fixed and steady medium, but 
 floating, turbid, circumambient, diversified, was precisely what 
 art needs to thrive in. Compare it with the atmosphere of 
 middle- class respectability, of modern conformity to one lax 
 rule of conduct, of the average decency for which contemporary 
 evening papers clamour ! It is clear that art, of the sort 
 which the Italians produced, has little chance here. Being 
 bound to present the stuff of human thought and emotion 
 under sensuous forms, seeking ever fresh manifestations for
 
 TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 107 
 
 that subject-matter, art flourishes best where the free play of 
 personality is possible. 
 
 Not then in vice and immorality (the weakness of the 
 Renaissance), but in unexampled many-sidedness of human 
 character (the strength of that epoch), must we seek the 
 solution of the problem offered by Italy in the sixteenth 
 century. 
 
 In like manner, it was not from the corruption of Athens, 
 from slavery, paiderastia, hetaira-worship, venality, delation, 
 democratic insubordination, that the noble arts and letters 
 of Hellas, the sculpture of Pheidias, the tragedy of Sophocles, 
 the comedy of Aristophanes, the history of Thucydides, the 
 philosophy of Plato emerged. No ; but in spite of these 
 things, and regardless of them, from the living well-springs 
 of a highly specialised and powerfully vital human energy, 
 they sprang into imperishable existence. 
 
 Let us not deceive ourselves. Art is indissolubly bound 
 up with man's spiritual forces. What we learn from the 
 Italian Renaissance or from the Athens of Socrates is this : 
 that art is able to assert man's moral nature at moments 
 when it seems in other spheres to have been paralysed or 
 vitiated.
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM. 
 
 SOME years ago I visited an exhibition of Italian pictures at 
 Turin. There was not much to arrest attention in the gal- 
 lery. Yet I remember two small companion panels by the 
 same hand, labelled respectively L'Ideale and II Reale. The 
 first of these paintings represented a consumptive, blonde- 
 haired girl of the Teutonic type, in pale drapery, raising her 
 romantic eyes to a watery moonlight sky. She was sitting 
 near a narrow Gothic window, which opened on a garden. 
 From the darkness below sprang cypresses and a tangle of 
 unclassified vegetation in vaporous indistinctness. The second 
 picture introduced the public to a naked woman, flaunting in 
 provocative animalism. She lolled along a bed, with hard 
 light beating on her body, intensified by hangings of a hot 
 red tone. Under the glare of that illumination her flesh shone 
 like copper, smooth as satin ; and the blue-black curls upon 
 her shoulders writhed like snakes. 
 
 Both of these pictures were ugly ; but while the Ideal 
 was tamely conceived and feebly executed, the Real dis- 
 played enthusiasm, joy in the subject, something of the 
 vigour derived from sympathy and from revolt. The artist 
 had evidently studied this symbolic figure from the life, 
 whereas her foil and pendant, the sentimental maiden, was 
 a figment of his scornful fancy. It seemed clear that he 
 intended to caricature the Ideal, and to record his preference 
 for the Real as men find that in some mauvais lieu. 
 
 Here, then, was an allegory of the antithesis between 
 Idealism and Realism, as these are vulgarly conceived. 
 Idealism, a mawkish phantasm of hectic virginity, of moon-
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 109 
 
 shine, violet-scent, and dewdrops. Realism, a brawny bit of 
 carnal actuality, presented with sensual gusto as the truest 
 truth of life and art. 
 
 Is there any solid foundation, I asked myself, for this 
 current conception of the antithesis between the Ideal and 
 Real ? Is there at bottom any antagonism between the two 
 terms ? Are they not rather correlated and inextricably inter- 
 woven both in nature and in art ? Suppose we concede for 
 the sake of argument that they may be regarded as exclusive, 
 each of the other, are we therefore to assume that Idealism is 
 moonshiny and insipid, Realism meretricious and revolting ? 
 There must surely be some deep misconception of the problem 
 on both sides. Why have the Idealists exposed their prin- 
 ciples to such caricature as this by pretending to dispense 
 with nature? Why do the Realists so confidently assert 
 that nothing has truth in it but what is libidinous or ugly, 
 commonplace or vicious ? 
 
 In the reality of human nature it is certain that beauty 
 and modesty, the chastity of saints and the severe strength 
 of athletes, the manhood of Regulus and the temperance of 
 Hippolytus, are quite as much in their own place as ugliness 
 and impudicity, the licentiousness of harlots and the flaccid 
 feebleness of debauchees, the effeminacy of Heliogabalus 
 and the untempered lusts of Roderigo Borgia. What we 
 call the intellectual and moral attributes of men are no less 
 real than their appetites and physical needs. The harmony 
 of a sane mind in a sane body is as matter-of-fact as the 
 deformity derived from cramping and distorting limitations. 
 All those things, therefore, to which our nature aspires, and 
 which we name ideal, must be the legitimate sphere of a 
 logical and sober Realism. Nay more, it is just these things 
 which are the most real in life, and which realistic art is 
 consequently bound to represent ; for they are the source 
 of strength, and permanence, and progress to the species. 
 Science teaches us convincingly that the superiority of each 
 race in the struggle for existence consists precisely in its 
 aptitude for the development of virtues. Badness, in one 
 word, is less real than goodness.
 
 110 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 Realism dares not separate itself from the Ideal, because 
 the Ideal is a permanent factor, and the most important 
 factor, in the reality of life. The Ideal is the manifesta- 
 tion of consciousness to itself, the pledge to the race of our 
 existing in a process of development. Evolution shows that 
 life is in continual progress ; and progress from one point 
 to another implies (in a highly complex animal like man) 
 the sense of a better to which the being tends ; in other 
 words, involves Idealism. How can the realistic artist afford 
 then to exclude so weighty and indestructible an element of 
 his main subject-matter ? What indeed has he to do but to 
 seek out and represent the whole reality of human nature, 
 extenuating nothing, setting nothing down in malice ? 
 His object is to reach and to express the truth. He may not 
 shirk what is ugly and animal in his fellow-creatures. 
 But he ought not to dote upon these points. Far less 
 ought he to repudiate those select qualities which men in 
 their long struggle with themselves and their environment 
 have gained as the most precious spoils of a continued 
 battle. 
 
 Furthermore, it is worth considering whether the artist, 
 il he dares and wishes to escape from Idealism, is able to do 
 so. I am convinced that he cannot, and this conviction 
 emboldens me to attempt once more the treatment of a 
 threadbare problem. 
 
 n 
 
 He must indeed be a bold man who invites the world to 
 listen while he talks about Idealism and Eealism. The very 
 terms have an obsolete scholastic flavour, like those famous 
 hobby-horses of the metaphysicians, Subject and Object. 
 Worse even : they suggest the impostures of aesthetic 
 coteries, the sermonising of self-consecrated priests con- 
 cerning mysteries no mind has clearly grasped. Plain people 
 are not unjustified in turning from such discussions with a 
 shrug of the shoulders and a yawn. 
 
 And yet there still remains something to be studied in 
 this hackneyed antithesis. Just as Subject and Object stand
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 111 
 
 for moments in our apperception of the universe, so the Ideal 
 and the Eeal indicate conditions under which the arts fulfil 
 their function. It is not therefore a hopeless task, though it 
 may demand a sanguine spirit, to throw light upon the 
 correlation of these terms. 
 
 I shall attempt to demonstrate that the warfare waged 
 about them in aesthetic schools arises from a false conception 
 of their mutual relations. In the philosophy of Being, 
 Subject and Object are posed as antithetical only to be 
 resumed as the conditions of experience. Even so Idealism 
 and Realism, in the philosophy of Art, denote an antagonism 
 which is more apparent than actual, and upon the resolution 
 of which in practice excellence depends. Both, in fact, and 
 both together, are present in every effort which we make to 
 reproduce and represent the outer world through art. 
 
 In order to gain limitations for the treatment of this 
 topic, I shall here confine myself to Sculpture and Painting. 
 The principles arrived at will be found applicable in some 
 measure to literature. But music and architecture, as is 
 manifest, do not fall immediately within the sphere of these 
 ideas. 
 
 Realism,' to begin with, forms the substratum and indis- 
 pensable condition of all figurative art. The very name 
 figurative, which we apply to Sculpture and Painting, 
 indicates that these arts proceed by imitation of external 
 objects, and mainly by imitation of the human form. Now 
 it would be absurd to contend that imitation is the worse 
 for being veracious, the worse for recalling to our minds 
 the imitated thing, or in other words, for being in the right 
 sense realistic. Nobody wants a portrait which is not as 
 precisely like the person represented, as exactly true to that 
 person's entire self, as it can possibly be made. We may 
 want something else besides ; but we demand resemblance 
 as an indispensable quality. Nobody again wants the image 
 of a god or saint which is not as accurately adequate to the 
 human form in which that godhead or that sanctity might 
 have resided, as knowledge and skill can make it. Whatever 
 else we desire of the image, we shall not think the better
 
 112 EEALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of it for being anatomically wrong. In other words, the 
 figurative arts, by the law which makes them imitate, are 
 bound at every step of their progress to be realistic. The 
 painter must depict each object with painstaking attention to 
 its details. He must aim at delineating the caper and the 
 columbine as faithfully as Titian did, armour as accurately as 
 Giorgione, pearls and brocade with the fidelity of John Van 
 Eyck, hands with the subtlety of Lionardo da Vinci, faces 
 with the earnest feeling after character displayed in Eaphael's 
 Leo or Velasquez' Philip. 
 
 This is the beginning of his task. But he very soon 
 discovers that he cannot imitate things exactly as they are 
 in fact. The reason of this is that the eye and the hand of 
 sculptor or painter are not a photographic camera. They 
 have neither the qualities nor the defects of a machine. 
 In every imitative effort, worthy of the name of art, the 
 human mind has intervened. What is more, this mind 
 has been the mind of an individual, with specific aptitudes 
 for observation, with specific predilections, with certain ways 
 of thinking, seeing, feeling, and selecting, peculiar to himself. 
 No human mind can grasp unmixed reality, except in the 
 sphere of mathematics. No two men see the same woman 
 or the same tree. Our impressions and perceptions are 
 necessarily coloured by those qualities which make us 
 percipient and impressible individualities, differing each from 
 his neighbour in a thousand minute particulars. 
 
 It is precisely at this point, at the very earliest attempt to 
 imitate, that Idealism enters simultaneously with Eealism 
 into the arts. The simplest as well as the most complex 
 work contains this element of ideality. For when a man 
 reproduces in art what he sees in nature, he inevitably imports 
 himself into the product. Thus the object and the idea exist 
 as twin-born factors in the merest rough sketch pencilled on 
 a scrap of paper. Strive as he will to keep himself out of 
 the imitation, the man is powerless to do so. The thing 
 imitated has of necessity become the thing imagined, by the 
 act of his transferring its outline to paper. 
 
 We may properly compare chiaroscuro drawings with
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 113 
 
 photographs, since in each case the result is a reproduction of 
 form under certain conditions of light and shade without 
 colour. Now, given the same advantage of illumination, 
 chemicals, exposure, and so forth, twenty photographic 
 cameras of equal dimensions and equal excellence will produce 
 almost identical representations of a single model. But set 
 twenty artists of equal skill in draughtsmanship to make 
 studies from one model, then, though the imitation may in 
 each case be equally faithful, there will be a different 
 intellectual quality, a different spiritual touch, a different 
 appeal to sympathy, a different order of suggestion in each of 
 the twenty drawings. In other words, each of the twenty 
 drawings represents the thing perceived and conceived 
 differently by each of the twenty draughtsmen. Some 
 specific ideality has formed an unavoidable feature of each 
 artist's work, while all have aimed, in like manner, at merely 
 reproducing the object before them. 
 
 This is perhaps the simplest way of presenting the truth 
 that Eealism and Idealism are as inseparable as body and 
 soul in every product of the figurative arts. In art it is not 
 a machine but a mind which imitates. Nay, even the hand 
 which draws is itself no mechanical instrument, but part of 
 a living organism, penetrated with intellectual vitality, instinct 
 with ideas. No draughtsman can rival the camera in bare 
 accuracy; but every draughtsman is bound to do what the 
 camera cannot do, by introducing a subjective quality into 
 the reproduction. 
 
 It will be convenient to put this point in a slightly different 
 way. When we analyse what goes to the production of a 
 work of art, we find, upon the one hand, an act of mental 
 intuition into the object which has to be represented, whereby 
 the nature of that object is imaginatively grasped. Upon the 
 other hand, we find that certain materials and processes have 
 been employed with more or less technical dexterity, as 
 marble, clay, wood, metal, colour upon canvas, colour upon 
 lime-surface, copper-plate bitten by burin and acid, and the 
 like. These materials and processes, forming the technical 
 
 i
 
 114 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 part of art-production, are symbols, much in the same sense 
 as words are symbols, for externalising a mental conception 
 of the object. They differ, indeed, from words, inasmuch as 
 the object to be represented is itself solid, and marble is solid ; 
 or is coloured, and the pigments on the painter's palette are 
 coloured ; or has a defined outline, with appreciable relations 
 of light to darkness, and an etching presents this outline with 
 similar relations of light to darkness. In fact, the symbols of 
 the figurative arts differ from the symbols used by poetry, in 
 this : that they are able to match or imitate certain salient 
 qualities in the object. Yet it is clear that they are recog- 
 nised as symbols, and that an exact copy of the object is 
 not the end of figurative art. If this were the end, the most 
 artistic portrait of a lady would be a carefully modelled wax- 
 figure, coloured to imitate her complexion, with glass eyes of 
 the right shade, artificial teeth, and a wig of real hair, the 
 whole attired in a suit of her own clothes. And even then 
 we should not have got rid of symbolism ; for wax and colour 
 are not flesh, glass eyes cannot contract their iris, nor does 
 any wig, however deftly made, spring from the forehead or 
 curl about the nape like living hair. Having then admitted 
 that all art, however apparently imitative, is symbolic, and 
 that it symbolises a conception formed of some external 
 object in the artist's mind, we are able to perceive that the 
 result will be more idealistic, or more realistic, according 
 to the bent of the man's sympathy with nature, according 
 to his choice of materials and processes, and, lastly, accord 
 ing to his method of employing these technical symbols. If 
 like the pedlar in Wordsworth's ' Peter Bell,' 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim, 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more, 
 
 then his picture of the primrose will be prosaically accurate. 
 It will be a botanical diagram, and its artistic value will 
 consist in the delicacy of draughtsmanship, the accuracy of 
 colouring, whereby some particular primrose has been repre-
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 115 
 
 sented. If, on the other hand, he views things like the poet 
 in Shelley's ' Prometheus Unbound,' l if 
 
 He will watch from dawn to gloom 
 The lake-reflected sun illume 
 The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, 
 Nor heed, nor see what things they be, 
 But from these create he can 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 Nurslings of immortality, 
 
 then his picture of the same primrose will result in a piece of 
 pure fancy, the chalice of a yellow flower exhaling some aerial 
 sylph, like those in William Blake's floral decorations. These 
 are extreme instances ; yet the rhythm of figurative symbolism, 
 even in the case of a primrose, passes from botanical diagrams 
 through William Hunt's exquisite portraits to Blake's fairies. 
 Look at the same matter from the point of view, not of imagi- 
 native insight, but of technical process. Should the artist 
 have a certain landscape in his mind, and should he choose 
 etching as the medium for its representation, he renounces the 
 larger part of those symbols which appeal immediately to the 
 senses. Colour is abstracted ; nothing remains but tone and 
 outline, and even these have to be imaginatively employed 
 for purposes of pure suggestion, since it is impossible in any 
 etching to obtain the correct values of light and dark in 
 nature. If, on the other hand, he works upon a large canvas 
 in oils, with all the pigments furnished by the colourman, he 
 aims at a more obviously imitative result. Yet he is still 
 dealing with symbols. He cannot get the whole light or the 
 whole dark of nature. He must manipulate, economise, and 
 conventionalise the hues of the scene before him. An etching 
 seems thus, by the qualities of the process, to be more 
 idealistic ; an oil picture, by its qualities, seems to be more 
 realistic. In other words, the essential symbolism of figura- 
 tive art is forced more obviously upon our attention by the 
 former than by the latter. Yet it would be a mistake to sup- 
 pose that what we mean by Realism is the technical side of 
 
 1 I allude to the well-known lines, beginning : 
 On a poet's lips I slept . . . 
 
 12
 
 116 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 art, and what we mean by Idealism is the imaginative side. 
 A work of art, patient and flawless in its technical execution, 
 may at the same time be highly idealistic. 1 Conversely, a 
 slovenly and ignorant piece of technical workmanship may 
 have no imaginative qualities to recommend it. 2 The truth 
 to remember is that, whatever process the figurative artist 
 uses, and however ably he employs his symbols, he cannot 
 remain a merely faithful copyist. Even the most prosaic 
 or wilfully imitative craftsman adds something of his own 
 imagination to the copy he produces, and is thwarted in any 
 attempt to avoid this necessity by the fact that he has only 
 symbols to deal with, and his individual perceptive faculty to 
 see by. 
 
 Ill 
 
 We must not pause here in our analysis of what the 
 draughtsman brings of ideality to his work. I have tried to 
 show that the bare attempt by a human being to imitate what 
 he sees before him introduces of necessity the element of 
 mind into his transcript from nature. But no human being 
 stands alone in this world. His own particular mental quality 
 is influenced by the thought of his race and epoch. The 
 intellectual atmosphere in which he lives determines him. 
 He cannot help being to some extent the creature of his age, 
 the child of antecedent ages. Thus, in addition to the specific 
 quality introduced by the artist into his imitation of an object, 
 there are universal mental elements, tending towards idealism, 
 which affect the whole function of art in each race and each 
 epoch. Should sculptor or painter try to be merely imitative, 
 crudely realistic, he cannot succeed so well as the photo- 
 graphic camera does. Should he never so obstinately cling to 
 the art for art principle, he cannot avoid suggesting thoughts 
 good, bad, or indifferent, noble or ignoble, pure or foul 
 through the form his thinking brain and intelligent fingers 
 have evolved from studies of reality. Morever, artists, their 
 
 1 Such work was that of Gian Bellini in his Madonna at the Frari. 
 
 2 Such work was that of Giorgio Vasari in his frescoes on the Cupola 
 of the Duomo at Florence.
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 117 
 
 works, and the people who survey their works, are environed 
 by a common atmosphere of ideas, which makes an art devoid 
 of ideality impossible. In art spirit communicates with spirit, 
 the spirit of the artist with the spirit of the spectator. 
 
 The demonstration of this deep-seated bond between 
 Idealism and Realism is so important that I must once 
 more approach it from a somewhat different point of view. 
 Twenty draughtsmen, we have seen, will not imitate the 
 same object with the same identity of result as twenty 
 photographic cameras. The draughtsman cannot be so 
 literally realistic as the machine ; he is bound to modify 
 his reproduction of the object by some note indicative of his 
 own mental and moral nature. He will not rival the machine 
 in accuracy; but he cannot avoid adding something which 
 the machine is powerless to give. It is precisely by 
 emphasising this quality which differentiates the draughts- 
 man from the machine, that the arts arrive at Idealism. 
 Art supplements its mechanical deficiencies, and exerts the 
 specific faculties of human beings by seeking after beauty 
 and by aiming at the expression of thought. It deliberately 
 cultivates the subjective element which is inevitably present 
 in every reproduction of an object by the human brain and 
 hand. In acting thus it utilises what might be described 
 as man's inferiority to a machine in graphic accuracy, while 
 it exercises man's superiority to the machine in power of 
 intellectual suggestion. To turn defects into forces by the 
 exertion of mind is the privilege which man possesses, 
 rendering him the lord over brutes and the controller of 
 mechanical instruments. So Idealism in art is the ultimate 
 elaboration of that comparative inaccuracy and that imported 
 subjective quality, both of which distinguish the most literal 
 drawing from a photograph. 
 
 Artistic beauty is mainly a matter of selection, due to 
 the exercise of those free mental faculties which the machine 
 lacks. The sculptor or the painter observes defects in 
 the single model ; he notices in many models scattered 
 excellences ; he has before him the most perfect forms 
 invented by his predecessors. To correct those defects, to
 
 118 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 reunite those excellences, to apply the principles of those 
 perfected types, becomes his aim. He cannot rival Nature 
 by producing anything exactly like her work, but he can 
 create something which shall show what Nature strives after. 
 BouAerai p.ev aXX.' ov Swarai, wrote Aristotle about Nature ; 
 ' she has the will but not the power to realise perfection.' 
 The mind of man comprehends her effort, and though the 
 skill of man cannot compete with her in the production 
 of particulars, he is able by art to anticipate her desires, 
 and to exhibit an image of what she was intending. As 
 Tennyson wrote in ' The Two Voices ' : 
 
 That type of perfect in his mind 
 Can he in Nature nowhere find. 
 
 This, at least, is how the matter appears to man ; although 
 it can hardly be doubted that Nature in her entirety is more 
 perfect than our imagination, could man but attain to 
 full and sympathetic comprehension of the universal scheme. 
 Perhaps it may be a defect in our perceptive faculty which 
 makes us discern and seek to remedy defect in nature. 
 Perhaps the truth may be that man's intelligence, being 
 at present the highest known thing in the universe, appre- 
 hends the relative inferiority of things below it in the scale 
 of being. Anyhow, the fact remains that we can observe 
 and correct ideally many blemishes in natural objects as, 
 for example, a thick ankle or a disproportioned leg, the 
 squint in the eyes of an otherwise symmetrical face, a hare- 
 lip, an unwieldy branch in some fine oak, an ungraceful 
 combination of lines in a mountain landscape. It is clearly 
 not the artist's duty to copy these apparent defects in 
 the object because they occur in nature, when his faculty 
 of generalisation enables him to rectify them by the analogy 
 of other objects in nature which are to us more pleasing, 
 and which more completely realise ' that type of perfect ' 
 existing in our intelligence. It is the same with ugliness 
 as with what we call sin, evil, pain, disease. All of these 
 qualities seem to us imperfections, and we are justified in 
 attempting to remove ugliness from the aesthetic sphere, 
 sin from the moral, pain and disease from the physical.
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 119 
 
 Yet those who believe that the universe, as at present 
 constituted, is in some inexplicable way a manifestation 
 of immanent divinity, must incline to the belief that all 
 evil, including ugliness, is only in appearance, and, as the 
 Greeks said, 'to us.' 
 
 All nature is but art unknown to thee ; 
 
 All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; 
 
 All discord, harmony not understood ; 
 
 All partial evil, universal good. 
 
 Such optimism, indeed, is not so unscientific as it looks. 
 Science in its most philosophical form introduces a spirituality 
 into our conceptions of the world, whereby we are being 
 brought back on surer paths to the Stoicism of Marcus 
 Aurelius or to the Theism of Bolingbroke and Pope. The 
 fact, however, remains that, with our present partial know- 
 ledge of the universe, ugliness, sin, pain, disease, all of which 
 are incontestably present in nature, contradict what we believe 
 to be the best part of ourselves, our mental imagination of 
 perfection. 
 
 ' To disengage the elements of beauty,' says Sainte-Beuve ; 
 1 To escape from the mere frightful reality,' says Joubert. 
 That is the function of the arts. Eeality, however, is never 
 in a true sense, frightful. Keality is always the sole sound 
 schoolmaster which brings us to a sense of ideal beauty. 
 Sculptor and painter are indeed bound to pass beyond the 
 model. They cannot, as I go on reiterating, even if they 
 would, abide by it as the camera or the plaster cast does. 
 The mere touch of the brush or the chisel, of 'the hand 
 which obeys the intellect,' prevents that. What they can 
 do, and what a mechanical process cannot do, is to interpret 
 it ; not to contradict it ; nay, rather to obey its leading ; 
 but to supplement its shortcomings, to elucidate its latent 
 suggestions of significance and loveliness. They do not aim 
 at producing a mere bare copy of their subject at some 
 accidental moment, for they know that the thing itself is 
 better than such a copy would be. They attempt to seize 
 and reveal its character at the very best, to represent what it 
 strives to be, to express its truest truth, not what is transitory
 
 120 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 and conditioned by circumstance, but what is permanent and 
 freed from limitations in it. 
 
 The figurative arts are thus led to what is after all their 
 highest function, the presentation of thought and feeling in 
 beautiful form. Statues and pictures must fall short of life 
 in flesh and blood reality. But these same works of human 
 industry can transfigure particular realities by infusing into 
 them the elements of generalisation, selection, interpretative 
 insight. These elements, in the language of discredited 
 schools, are expression and idealisation. According to the 
 demonstration I have attempted in this essay, they may be 
 better described as the final outcome of those qualities 
 partly defect of mechanical accuracy, partly addition of 
 mental sensibility which distinguish a drawing from a cast 
 or photograph. They are the deliberate elaboration of the 
 subjective ingredient which is found in every imitation by 
 the hand of man. 
 
 IV 
 
 Figurative art, in its most vital epochs, lent itself to 
 the expression of religious ideas. The artist had to find 
 corporeal investiture for the generalised and divinised 
 qualities of human nature. Such exact corporeal investiture 
 for a spiritual type of human energy or passion is rarely, if 
 ever, offered by a single living person. Who, for example, 
 has seen a man or woman of whom he could say, ' There 
 goes Zeus,' or, ' There goes Aphrodite ' ? What we do say is 
 rather, 'Majestic as Zeus, beautiful as Aphrodite.' In other 
 words, the living person suggests hints to the artist for work- 
 ing out ' that type of perfect in his mind.' The artist, then, 
 is compelled to create a body for the idea he has to express ; 
 more majestic or more beautiful than any single body he 
 has ever seen ; more completely adequate to the idea ; more 
 thoroughly penetrated with the specific qualities of the 
 spiritual type in all its parts. At the same time this form 
 must not, at any point, be discordant with the structure of 
 the human body as he learns to know it from his models. 
 It must, on the contrary, be most faithful to those models,
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 121 
 
 enhancing and accentuating their suggestions, interpreting 
 with loyal conscientiousness nature's effort to effectuate perfec- 
 tion. Here at last we touch Idealism in its essence. But 
 such Idealism, when sound and healthy, is only Kealism in 
 the intensest phase of veracity ; it is truth quintessenced and 
 raised to the highest power. Such is the ultimate expansion 
 of those factors which we found to be co-existent in the 
 simplest sketch from nature. 
 
 In the right understanding of this correlation between 
 Realism and Idealism the Greek sculptors are our surest 
 teachers. It was incumbent upon them to create images of 
 gods and goddesses and heroes, each of whom represented 
 in perfection some one psychological attribute of human 
 nature. For these spiritual essences they were bound to find 
 fit incarnation through the means available by art. They 
 therefore always had before their minds the problem how 
 to invest such isolated attributes with appropriate forms 
 how to fashion a Zeus who should be all- majestic, a Herakles 
 who should be strength personified, an Aphrodite who should 
 be the consummation of feminine attractiveness, a Faun who 
 should be light and active as the creatures of the woodland 
 without ceasing to be man in shape. The solution of this 
 problem forced them to idealise, while their exquisite sense 
 for the beauty, grace, and dignity of the living model kept 
 them realistically faithful to minutest facts in nature. 
 
 In order to illustrate how the best Greek work exhibits 
 that right blending of the ideal with the real, on which 
 I am insisting, I will quote a passage from Haydon's auto- 
 biography, which records the impression made upon his 
 mind by the first sight of the Elgin marbles. It must be 
 remembered that Haydon grew up in England at a time when 
 Reynolds, Fuseli, and West had saturated the art schools 
 with false doctrine about ' the beau-ideal,' ' the grand style,' 
 ' the superiority of art to nature.' Haydon, though he never 
 worked out the problems of design successfully in his own 
 practice, was convinced that Realism, or truth to actual fact, 
 formed the only solid basis for sculpture and painting. 
 Consequently, when he found the closest observation of nature
 
 122 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 combined with the loftiest heroic style in the fragments of 
 the Parthenon, these had for him authentic inspiration ; they 
 delivered him from what was specious and misleading in the 
 Idealism of his epoch : they confirmed him in his own 
 instinctive belief that genuine grandeur was not only com- 
 patible with the most painstaking imitation of the model, 
 but that such devotion to the truth of nature formed an 
 indispensable condition of masterly creative work. Here was 
 an apocalypse of the right method for all art and in all 
 ages. Here was a demonstration of the indissoluble and 
 organic link between the sublimest Idealism and the humblest 
 Kealism. 
 
 There is so much of a curious sort of pathos, combined 
 with so much of passionate and sudden enthusiasm, in 
 Hay don's narrative, that I venture to reproduce a large 
 portion of it textually. It should not be forgotten that to 
 this man, in no small measure, English people owe the 
 presence in their midst of these Parthenon sculptures, and all 
 that flows therefrom for better or for worse : 
 
 1 To Park Lane then we went, and after passing through the hall 
 and thence into an open yard, entered a damp, dirty pen-house, where 
 lay the marbles ranged within sight and reach. 
 
 ' The first thing I fixed my eyes on was the wrist of a figure in one of 
 the female groups, in which were visible, though in a feminine form, the 
 radius and ulna. I was astonished, for I had never seen them hinted at 
 in any female wrist in the antique. I darted my eye to the elbow, and 
 saw the outer condyle visibly affecting the shape as in nature. I saw that 
 the arm was in repose and the soft parts in relaxation. That combina- 
 tion of nature and idea which I had felt was so much wanting for high 
 art was here displayed to midday conviction. My heart beat ! If I had 
 seen nothing else, I had beheld enough to keep me to nature for the rest 
 of my life. But when I turned to the Theseus and saw that every form 
 was altered by action or repose when I saw that the two sides of his 
 back varied, one side stretched from the shoulder-blade being pulled 
 forward, and the other side compressed from the shoulder-blade being 
 pushed close to the spine as he rested on his elbow, with the belly flat 
 because the bowels fell into the pelvis as he sat and when, turning to 
 the Ilissus, I saw the belly protruded from the figure lying on its side 
 and again when in the figure of the fighting Metope I saw the muscle 
 shown under the arm-pit in that instantaneous action of darting out, 
 and left out in the other arm-pits because not wanted when I saw, in
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 123 
 
 fact, the most heroic style combined with all the essential detail of 
 ctual life, the thing was done at once and for ever. ... I felt as if a 
 divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind, and I knew that they 
 [the marbles] would at last rouse the art of Europe from its slumber in 
 the darkness.' 
 
 At this point it is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to 
 attempt the definition of Eealism and Idealism. We have 
 already learned that every work of figurative art contains 
 both elements, whether this be a simple pencil-drawing from 
 a single model, or a composition so complex as the friezes of 
 the Parthenon. Yet it is obvious that the artist may lean 
 more to one side than the other. He may choose to concen- 
 trate his powers upon the literal imitation of objects rather 
 than upon the development of subjective qualities. Or, on 
 the other hand, he may devote his whole attention to the 
 refinement of an intellectual type of beauty or to the expres- 
 sion of thoughts, remaining content with slovenly execution 
 and feeble grasp on fact. At one period of art, and in one 
 school, tendencies in favour of crude Eealism will prevail ; at 
 another time, or in another region, the bias will be toward 
 unsubstantial Idealism. We cannot always expect that per- 
 fect synthesis which makes the work of Pheidias exemplary. 
 It is therefore profitable to define the two factors which are 
 for ever being brought by the practice of art into more or 
 less complete accord. 
 
 Kealism is the presentation of natural objects as the artist 
 sees them, as he thinks they are. It is the attempt to imitate 
 things as they strike the senses. 
 
 Idealism is the presentation of natural objects as the artist 
 fain would see them, as he thinks they strive to be. It is the 
 attempt to imitate things as the mind interprets them. 
 
 I may pause to remark, that the distinction implied in these 
 definitions is as old as Aristotle. In the Poetics we read : 
 ' Sophocles used to say that he depicted men as they ought 
 to be, Euripides as they are.' In other words, Sophocles 
 regarded himself as an idealist, Euripides as a realist. Again :
 
 124 KEALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 ' Polygnotus painted men better than they are, Pauson worse 
 than they are, Dionysius as they are.' In other words, Poly- 
 gnotus was an idealist, Pauson a caricaturist, Dionysius a 
 realist. Once again, speaking more generally of painters, 
 Aristotle gives a clear account of idealists : ' While making 
 men like men they paint them fairer.' 1 
 
 Now this distinction, which is based upon the fundamental 
 properties of human as distinguished from mechanical imita- 
 tion, has been fruitful of results both in the practice and the 
 theory of the art. Draughtsmen very soon discover that they 
 cannot wholly eliminate an idealistic or subjective element 
 from their work; but they are able either to keep this in 
 abeyance or to emphasise it. They can swerve more to the 
 side of literal delineation, or more to the side of imaginative 
 selection. Theorists and writers upon art, noticing this power 
 of choice, have divided into hostile camps ; and the doctrines 
 of the schools have reacted upon practice. Notwithstanding 
 the impossibility of separating the twin-born factors of every 
 human imitative product, antagonistic standards of the Real 
 and the Ideal came thus into existence. The warfare of 
 opinion on this crucial point diverts practical artists from 
 consistently aiming at that just balance between the careful 
 study of nature and the effort to interpret nature, which is the 
 mark of supreme art. 
 
 I will illustrate my meaning by referring to European art 
 in the last three centuries. When sculpture and painting 
 declined in Italy, after the death of Michel Angelo, artists 
 began to withdraw from the study of life. Theories were pro- 
 mulgated to the effect that nature hampers the freedom of 
 genius, and obscures the inspiration which illuminates the 
 artist's soul. It was maintained that he ought only to know 
 so much of nature as would save his work from monstrosity. 
 He was told that art bettered nature, and that the pains- 
 taking imitation of details lowered style. This led to super- 
 ficial, slovenly, conceited compositions being palmed off as 
 sublime. The frigid abstractions of the Bolognese Eclectics 
 passed for heroic, because they avoided literal painstaking 
 1 These passages will be found in cap. xxvi. and cap. ii.
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 125 
 
 transcripts from reality. The doctrine of the beau ideal was 
 preached in France. Sir Joshua Keynolds dilated on the 
 Grand Style. David, with his pseudo -classicism, imposed 
 on Paris as the reviver of the Greek manner. West in 
 England, vacuous and feeble, took rank among the great 
 religious painters. A spurious Idealism reigned supreme ; 
 and through the starvation of her twin-sister Realism, art 
 fell into decay. 
 
 A reaction was necessitated. The world had been filled 
 with manneristic technicalities and with shallow academical 
 pomposities with ideal figures, ideal faces, ideal draperies, 
 ideal landscapes, ideal trees, which were only ideal because 
 they resembled nothing real precisely. The reaction assumed 
 many forms ; it showed itself earliest in a revived admiration 
 for Dutch painting and in the English school of landscape ; 
 it took definite shape in the Romanticists of France and 
 Germany and in the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of England. 
 But that which principally concerns us here is its final mani- 
 festation in what is now called Realism. This, of a truth, is 
 rather a phase of literature than of figurative art ; yet it may 
 be studied in contemporary sculpture and painting no less 
 than in poetry and fiction. 
 
 Realism, being a revolt against the false principles of that 
 phthisical Idealism which claimed the empire in despite of 
 Nature, has attached itself to the ugly, the commonplace, the 
 vicious in human existence ; it has set its face steadily against 
 selection and interpretation ; it has striven to represent things 
 merely as they are, and not the best things. 
 
 In so doing the Realists have chosen an illogical and 
 untenable position ; for nothing is more manifest than that 
 beauty is as real as ugliness, purity as obscenity, virtue as 
 vice, health and harmony as disease and discord. Indeed, as 
 I have remarked above, the whole history of the world proves 
 that the good possesses more of reality, more of permanence, 
 than the bad. Reactions and revolutions, however, are never 
 just. And thus it is with contemporary Realism. Conscious 
 that Idealism, in the effete forms of the last century, was a 
 sham conscious that this impostor claimed the monopoly
 
 126 REALISM AND IDEALISM 
 
 of beauty, purity, virtue, harmony the reactionaries studied 
 reality where it is most painfully apparent and least capable 
 of being confounded with the idealistic object of their hatred. 
 They chose the sphere of vulgarity and pathology as though 
 this were eminently real. Philosophers, meanwhile, can wel- 
 come even Zola's ' Nana ' for the sake of its reactionary force. 
 We know that the pendulum must swing back from that ex- 
 treme point. The arts are bound to recognise the truth that 
 it is not their duty and their glory to represent deformity. But 
 the arts will have been the better for those drastic studies 
 which force them to face their problem in its crudest shape. 
 
 Resuming what I have attempted to establish, we find in 
 the art-history of the present century a false Idealism super- 
 seded by a false Realism. Both are false, because neither 
 recognises the correlation of these elements, which, in the 
 work of Pheidias, we have seen to be supremely harmonised. 
 The idealist sought to dispense with the necessary interroga- 
 tion of nature ; the realist seeks to ignore the fact that art 
 must aim at selection and must disengage the elements of 
 beauty inherent in nature. The one regarded man's incapa- 
 city to rival a machine with pride, and deemed his power 
 of independent imagination sufficient for itself. The other, 
 indignant at the miserable consequences of such arrogance, 
 strives to reduce man's mind, so far as possible, to the con- 
 dition of an imitative machine. 1 
 
 Meanwhile, this uncompromising Realism is by no means 
 the most hopeful or the most prominent feature in the art of 
 our age. On various lines, in many divers ways, since the 
 reaction against false Idealism set in, have attempts been 
 made to solve the problem of combining the twin factors in 
 a due and vital correlation. Together with improved con- 
 ditions of study in our art- schools, the attention paid to the 
 monuments of Sculpture and Painting in their best periods 
 (Hellenic, mediaeval, early Italian, Flemish, French) has been 
 progressively helpful ; while no one can exaggerate the im- 
 portance of such moral teaching as Mr. Ruskin gives so 
 copiously to the student. 
 
 1 Many writers of fiction appear, in their dialogue, to be vainly com- 
 peting with the phonograph.
 
 REALISM AND IDEALISM 127 
 
 The task of forming a noble style is one of peculiar diffi- 
 culty under the conditions of our epoch, because the arts have 
 no longer a sphere of thoughts to work in, which stimulates 
 the exercise of the highest imaginative faculties. We saw 
 how Greek sculptors were compelled to idealise by their obli- 
 gation to incarnate the Olympian divinities, and how at the 
 same time their exquisite feeling for nature kept them within 
 the limits of sober realistic truth. Like them, the earlier 
 Italian painters dealt with the mythology of an anthropo- 
 morphic religion : their task was only a trifle less favourable 
 to the right elucidation of the ideal from the real than was 
 that of Pheidias. But we live at a period when theistic con- 
 ceptions, or, in other words, the most deeply-penetrating and 
 universally-accepted thoughts of the race, no longer lend them- 
 selves to aesthetic presentation. They have grown too rarefied, 
 too abstract, too purely intellectual, for adequate treatment 
 by the figurative artist. In the place of Hellenic myth and 
 Christian legend, the vast scientific theory of the Cosmos has 
 arisen, itself pregnant with a new metaphysic and a new 
 theology, but as yet imperfectly appropriated and ill-adapted 
 to the plastic presentation of its fundamental ideas. Science 
 moreover, has made one fact manifest, that the more we come 
 to know instead of dreaming about things, the less can we 
 tolerate to have those things misrepresented in accordance 
 with some whimsical or obsolescent fancy. Science has ren- 
 dered our sense of veracity acute. Under its influence we 
 tend to become positive, shy of anything which seems untrue 
 to fact, intolerant of a merely allegorical use of known things 
 to express visions however beautiful, or aspirations however 
 honourable. We require the vraie v6riU so far as we can 
 get it. Art, obliged to obey the mental stress of the epoch, 
 deprived of a widely-accepted body of sensuous religious 
 thoughts, leans of necessity more to Realism than it did in the 
 Athens of Pericles or in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici. 
 
 On a future occasion I hope to return to this subject, and 
 to point out those elements of ideality in modern life and 
 thought, which lie ready to the uses of the arts, and on which 
 the arts have already seized with profit.
 
 THE MODEL 
 
 I ATTEMPTED in the preceding essay to show that figurative 
 art implies a certain relation between realism and idealism, 
 which varies according to the volition of the artist. In other 
 words, the artist cannot avoid modifying his imitation of the 
 chosen object by the infusion of his own subjective quality : 
 but he is at liberty to reduce this subjective element to a 
 minimum, or, on the other hand, to regard it as his chief 
 concern. 
 
 Human art is unable to reproduce nature, except upon such 
 terms as these. It cannot draw as accurately as the sun does 
 by means of the photographic camera. It cannot render 
 dialogue with the fidelity of a phonograph. At the same 
 time it is obliged to import something which external nature 
 does not possess, something which belongs exclusively to the 
 spirit of man, in all its transcripts from the world around us. 
 
 To say that art is superior to nature would be an imperti- 
 nence. Yet art has a sphere separate from and beyond 
 nature, which belongs to ideas, to emotions, to sentiments, to 
 the region of the human spirit. This sphere is not alien to 
 nature : indeed it is the highest thing known to us in the 
 universe ; being, as it is, the specific property of man, who is 
 himself a part of nature. 
 
 II 
 
 Those who have attentively studied a fine nude model, 
 observing the gradations of colour, the play of light and shade 
 and shadow upon the surface of the flesh, attending to the
 
 THE MODEL 129 
 
 intricate details of muscular and bony structure thus revealed, 
 marking the thrill of life in pulse and respiration and slight 
 alterations of attitude, such students will perforce concede that 
 no drawing, whether it be by the hand of Lionardo da Vinci 
 or of Ingres, can bear comparison with the living miracle 
 displayed before them. In so far as the drawing conscien- 
 tiously portrays the model, it calls forth admiration by its 
 exhibition of the draughtsman's skill ; it instructs a learner 
 by the revelation of his method. Yet it remains a poor and 
 feeble shadow of the truth. Art, we say, is immeasurably 
 below fact, so long as it attempts to rival the glow and richness 
 of the living man by its mere shadow-scheme of imitation. 
 
 In a second degree such drawings are inferior to really 
 careful photographs from the nude. I have before me a repro- 
 duction of the celebrated study of two naked men, which 
 Raphael sent as a specimen of his skill to Albert Diirer, and 
 also a photograph from a model in almost exactly the same 
 position as one of Eaphael's figures. 1 The model in my 
 photograph is somewhat coarse and vulgar. Yet no one, on 
 comparing these two forms (the crayon study and the photo- 
 gragh), can fail, I think, to acknowledge the superiority of the 
 more literal transcript from nature. Gunning as was Raphael's 
 craft, there is slovenly drawing in the hands and feet, exagge- 
 rated markings in the knee-joints, unmeaning salience of 
 muscle on the back, and a too violent curve in the outline of 
 the belly. The sun drew better than Raphael : and the 
 photograph of this common model is more delightful to look 
 at, because more adequate to the infinite subtlety of nature, 
 than the masterpiece of the great draughtsman of Urbino. 
 Every detail of the body here is right, and in right relation 
 to the whole ; every sinew explains itself without effort and 
 without emphasis ; and the ripple of light and shade over the 
 
 1 Baphael's drawing (in the Albertina collection, at Vienna, I believe) 
 is inscribed by Diirer : ' 1515. Kaffahill di Urbin der so hoch beiin Pabst 
 geacht ist gewest hat die hat diese nacken bild gemacht und hat sy dem 
 Albrccht Diirer gen Nurnberg geschiecht um sein Hand zu weisen.' 
 The photograph of the model is one issued in Vienna for the use of art- 
 students. 
 
 E
 
 130 THE MODEL 
 
 whole flesh surface exhibits vital energy in a way which no 
 work of art has ever done. 
 
 It will, however, be objected that to contrast a chalk 
 drawing with a photograph from nature is not fair. The 
 former must always, to some extent, resemble a diagram, 
 while the latter represents at least the fulness and complete- 
 ness of life. I therefore pass on to a third degree of 
 comparison ; and for this purpose I will select companion 
 reproductions by photography of Flandrin's famous study 
 in the Luxembourg and of a living model in the same 
 attitude. 1 (Flandrin's picture, it will be remembered, repre- 
 sents a young man seated naked on a rock above the sea, with 
 a craggy line of coast in the far distance. His legs are 
 gathered up to the belly, and clasped with both hands above 
 the ankles ; his head is bent upon the knees, so that nothing 
 of the facial expression is visible.) Any unfairness in this 
 comparison will certainly be to the injury of the model ; for 
 Flandrin's picture has all the advantage of the most con- 
 summate brushwork, and of the most careful attention to light 
 and shade upon flesh surfaces. It is in fact an elaborate oil- 
 painting of high technical excellence and elevated style. My 
 photograph from the model is a comparatively poor one ; the 
 subject has not been selected with care, and the print is flat. 
 Yet I learn from it innumerable niceties which Flandrin has 
 not worked out something about the spring and strain of 
 tendons in the wrist and forearm where the hand is clasped ; 
 something about the wrinkles in the belly caused by the forward 
 bending of the back ; something about the prolongation of the 
 muscles of the pleura due to the stretching of the arm in that 
 position. The model, moreover, is most interesting, more 
 rich in suggestions of vital energy and movement. From the 
 point of view of uncompromising realism, there can be no 
 doubt which is the more satisfactory performance. The 
 photograph of the model is second, the photograph of the 
 picture is third, in its remove from nature, from reality, from 
 
 1 The Autotype Company sells an admirable carbon photograph of 
 Flandrin's picture. The photograph of the model is from the series 
 issued for art-students at Vienna, mentioned in a note above.
 
 THE MODEL 131 
 
 truth. If the aim of art be to render a literal image of the 
 object, then the art of the camera in this competition bears 
 away the palm. 
 
 Nevertheless there is equally no doubt that Flandrin's 
 study is a painted poem, while the photograph of the nude 
 model is only what one may see any morning if one gets a 
 well-made youth to strip and pose. 
 
 What then gives Flandrin's picture its value as an artistic 
 product, as a painted poem ? It tells no story, has no obvious 
 intention ; the painter clearly meant it to be as perfect a 
 transcript from the nude, as near to the vraie verit& of nature, 
 as he could make it. The answer is that, although he may 
 not have sought to idealise, although he did not seek to 
 express a definite thought, his picture is penetrated with 
 spiritual quality. In passing through the artist's mind, this 
 form of a mere model has been transfigured. While it has 
 lost something of the vivacity and salient truth of nature, it 
 has acquired permanence, dignity, repose, elevation. It has 
 become 'a thing of beauty, a joy for ever,' in a sense in 
 which no living person, however far more attractive, more 
 interesting, more multiformly charming, can be described by 
 these terms. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Art will never match the infinite variety and subtlety 
 of nature; no drawing or painting will equal the primary 
 beauties of the living model. We cannot paint a tree as 
 lovely as the tree upon the field in sunlight is. We cannot 
 carve a naked man as wonderful as the youth stripped there 
 upon the river's bank before his plunge into the water. 
 Therefore the thorough-going Eealist ought frankly to 
 abandon figurative art, and to content his soul with the 
 exhibition and contemplation of actual nature. This, how- 
 ever, is not the conclusion to which our argument leads ; 
 for after we have admitted the relative inferiority of art to 
 nature, we know that art has qualities, all of them derived 
 from the intellectual, selective, imaginative faculties of man, 
 which more than justify its existence. 
 
 K2
 
 132 THE MODEL 
 
 The brain, by interposing its activity in however slight a 
 degree between the object and the representation, is bound 
 to interpret, and in so far to idealise. The primary reality 
 of the model, the secondary reality of the photographic 
 portrait, are exchanged for reality as the artist's mind and 
 heart have conceived it. Thus what a man sees and feels 
 in the world around him, what he selects from it, and how 
 he presents it, constitutes the differentia of art. He may 
 falsify or faithfully report, elevate or degrade, eliminate the 
 purest form from nature, or produce a gross satire of her 
 most beautiful creations. This intervention of the artist's 
 mind between the object and the figured representation 
 makes him an interpreter; it invests all works of art with 
 Some mood, some tone, some suggestion of human thought 
 and emotion. And whether this intervention be voluntary 
 or involuntary matters little. The point to fix on is that 
 the artist's mind cannot be inoperative in the processes of 
 art. The imported element of subjectivity will be definite 
 or vague, according to the intensity of the artist's character, 
 and according to the amount of purpose or conviction which 
 he felt while working ; it will be genial or repellent, tender 
 or austere, humane or barbarous, depraving or ennobling, 
 chaste or licentious, sensual or spiritual, according to the bias 
 of his temperament. 
 
 Now it is just this intervention of a thinking, feeling 
 subjectivity which makes Flandrin's study of the young man 
 alone upon the rock a painted poem. We may not, while 
 looking at this picture, be quite sure what the meaning of 
 the poem is : different minds, as in the case of musical 
 melody, will be affected by it in divers ways. To me, for 
 instance, the picture suggests resignation, the mystery of fate, 
 the calm of acquiescence. The ocean which surrounds that 
 solitary form, and the distant coast-line, add undoubtedly 
 to an imaginative impression of the sort I have described. 
 These accessories are absent in the photograph of the model, 
 which only suggests the interior of a studio. In so far, 
 therefore, as they contribute to the total effect of Flandrin's 
 picture, the mere model is at a palpable disadvantage. Yet
 
 THE MODEL 138 
 
 we might transfer the model to a real rock, with the same 
 scene of sea and coast painted behind him for a background ; 
 or better, we might place him in a position on some spur of 
 Capri's promontories with the Sorrentine headland for back- 
 ground ; but in neither case should we obtain the result 
 achieved by Flandrin. A photograph from the model in 
 these circumstances would not influence our mind in the same 
 manner. The beauty of the study might be even greater; 
 the truth to fact, to nature's infinite variety of structure in 
 the living body, would be undoubtedly more striking ; the 
 emotion stirred in us might be more pungent, and our interest 
 more vivid ; yet something, that indeed which makes the 
 poem, would have disappeared. Instead of being toned to 
 the artist's mood by sympathy with the ideas vague but 
 deep as melody which the intervention of his mind imports 
 into the subject, we should dwell upon the vigour of 
 adolescent manhood, we should be curious perhaps to see 
 the youth spring up, we should wonder how his lifted eyes 
 might gaze on us, and what his silent lips might utter. 
 
 IV 
 
 Through the art of the sculptor and the painter the 
 human form acquires a language, inexhaustible in symbolism, 
 every limb, every feature, every attitude, being a word full 
 of significance to those who comprehend. Through him a 
 well-shaped hand, or throat, or head, a neck superbly poised 
 on an athletic chest, the sway of the trunk above the hips, 
 the starting of the muscles on the flank, the tendons of the 
 ankle strained for speed, the outline of the shoulder when 
 the arm is raised, the backward bending of the loins, the 
 contours of a body careless in repose or girt for action, are 
 all pregnant with spiritual meaning. It is not necessary that 
 the artist should seek to express ideas while studying and 
 reproducing them. It is enough that he has felt them, 
 thought them out, passed them through the alembic of his 
 mind. Paint or carve the body of a man, and, as you do this 
 nobly, you will give the measure of both highest thought
 
 134 THE MODEL 
 
 and most impassioned deed ; as you do this ignobly, you 
 will suggest evil lusts, animal grossness, or contemptible 
 deformities. The artist, owing to the conditions under which 
 he works, cannot fail to be an interpreter ; unable to reproduce 
 the object as it is, he must reproduce what his own self 
 brings to it. 
 
 Style is thus an all-important factor in what I have called 
 interpretation, and upon which the ideal element of art 
 depends. Style has been defined as equivalent to the specific 
 qualities of the individual Le style c'est I'homme. Style has 
 also been described as a recasting or remoulding of the stuff 
 of thought. In the figurative arts, style passes form through 
 the crucible of a mind which perceives its qualities in some 
 specific way ; style infuses the man, the spiritual nature of 
 the artist, into his reproduction of the object. Style is what 
 a sentient being, when he tries to imitate, cannot help adding 
 to the thing he renders ; it is what obliges the artistic 
 transcript to affect our minds quite otherwise than the thing 
 in nature does. 
 
 These considerations might be pursued into the subtlest 
 and remotest regions. Art being essentially ' form-giving,' 
 and the form being determined by the artist's specific power 
 of selection, and preference for some one aspect or another 
 of the material supplied by nature, it follows that no two 
 men can treat the same subject in the same way. Each 
 individual, to put this point somewhat differently, has his 
 own style ; and the exercise of style renders his work not 
 only a copy of the thing perceived, but also an expression 
 of character in the perceiving person. To eliminate the 
 mental element from art, the element of style, the element of 
 interpretation, is therefore utterly impossible. What we call 
 the successive manners of the same master are mainly the 
 result of changes in his way of thinking and feeling, which 
 have necessitated corresponding changes in his interpretation 
 of nature. Compare Eaphael's treatment of the female nude 
 in his small panel of the Three Graces (once in Lord 
 Dudley's, now in the Due d'Aumale's possession) with his 
 treatment of the female nude in the Farnesina frescoes, and
 
 THE MODEL 135 
 
 you will perceive how the man's emotional and intellectual 
 attitude had altered between the period of his first and that 
 of his third manner. 
 
 From these reflections upon the points of difference 
 between a model and a picture from the model, we may 
 return to the old problem of idealism and realism, in 
 order to grasp their correlation in plastic works of art more 
 firmly. 
 
 How striking is the contrast between any photograph from 
 the nude, male or female, and a mezzotint by Bartolozzi ! 
 The photograph presents realism in its crudest, most un- 
 compromising aspect ; sex and the individual are rendered 
 with brutal fidelity. The mezzotint presents idealism in its 
 flimsiest and most conventional aspect : it is difficult to say 
 whether those decorative figures are meant for men or 
 women ; the individual disappears in an agreeable generalisa- 
 tion. Without wishing to create hermaphrodites, the draughts- 
 man produced sexless beings. He sacrificed character, specific 
 type, salience of structure, to the incarnation of a sentiment. 
 Art, when it reached this point, had passed into a kind of 
 senile symbolism, the symbolism of insincerity and second 
 childhood, aiming at nothing but how to clothe a faint and 
 saccharine emotion with graceful form. 
 
 The revolt against this disloyalty to truth justified the 
 action of modern realistic and naturalistic schools. It was 
 felt, and rightly felt, that almost any crudity is less offensive 
 than such emasculate distortion of the human form for 
 ornamental purposes. It was felt, and rightly felt, that the 
 idealism of Bartolozzi is the suicide of art. 
 
 Yet the question remains, whether uncompromising realism 
 is not in its turn also the suicide of art. Driven by contempt 
 for feeble idealism into blunt copying of what they see before 
 them, realistic draughtsmen find themselves at once outrivalled 
 by the model or the photograph. 
 
 Art, after passing through the reactionary stage of realism, 
 must become once more symbolic on a higher level. In its
 
 136 THE MODEL 
 
 inability to reproduce Tom, Jack, and Harry, powerful and 
 animated types of individual life, it will be forced to do as 
 Michel Angelo and William Blake did, with deeper and 
 more modest reverence for fact than they possessed. Michel 
 Angelo cared much for the human body ; Blake cared little 
 for it. Both violated the truth and excellence of nature 
 the one by studied mathematical hypertrophy of form 
 the other by visionary disregard of structure. But both 
 succeeded in making the body symbolic of emotion and of 
 thought. 
 
 We might parody the famous saying of Pascal, and declare 
 that the consummate artist must be a realiste accompli and 
 an idealiste soumis. In other words, he must use the truest 
 truth of nature, the most scientific grasp on actual form, in 
 the service of imaginative symbolism. He must at one and 
 the same time both obey and control the model, departing 
 at no point from its teaching, but utilising its character and 
 individuality for the further purpose of expression.
 
 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION, 
 CHARACTERISATION 
 
 IN the two previous essays I drew attention to what may be 
 called the spontaneous or involuntary elements of ideality 
 existing in all products of the figurative arts. These 
 elements, culminating in style, denote the necessary interven- 
 tion of human intelligence and feeling in every imitative 
 effort. It is due to them that imitations made by the artist's 
 brain and hand differ in essential respects from imitations 
 made by a machine, and also that no two persons can produce 
 exactly similar transcripts from the same object. 
 
 The question, however, may be asked whether imitation 
 is the real aim pursued by art. It obviously constitutes the 
 most prominent condition under which the plastic arts fulfil 
 their function. To imitate something can be termed the 
 radical, initial impulse which leads in course of time to 
 independent artistic activity. Figures of men and reindeer 
 scratched on bone implements of the Stone epoch indicate 
 this primal impulse in its earliest stage. Yet even here we 
 may doubt whether the mimetic effort was not subordinate 
 to some free imaginative exercise of mind. Children teach 
 us on this point. It is clear that when they rudely sketch 
 a man or dog, they are thinking of something of which the 
 scrawled man or dog is but a symbol. Their delight in the 
 symbol is quite out of proportion to its value as a representa- 
 tion of the object. The imitative act and the symbolic shape 
 which results therefrom, are therefore the index of another 
 and ulterior working of their mind.
 
 138 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 We may dismiss the mimetic essays of primitive men and 
 children without further notice. What we are at present 
 concerned with is so different in degree of skill as almost to 
 be different in kind, namely art-work produced by the highest 
 faculties of civilised adult humanity. Now, when we reflect 
 upon the totality of such things presented to our observation, 
 we are led to the conclusion that none of the arts has, hitherto 
 at least, been satisfied with simple imitation. This is clear 
 enough in the case of architecture and music. Poetry can 
 only be called an imitative instead of an expressive or pre- 
 sentative art, in the same way as speech in general might, by 
 a kind of quibble, be called imitative. Even the plastic arts, 
 although they are bound to copy visible objects, do not do 
 so for the sake of imitation. Their object is to give delight 
 to the mind through the sense of vision. With this purpose 
 in view, they exercise qualities in the artist which are distinct 
 from his mimetic skill. Speaking broadly, we find that 
 beauty, composition, expression, and characterisation are 
 governing conditions, to which the imitative process has been 
 subordinated, and without which we do not dignify the copy 
 of an object with the name of art- work. 
 
 I think it can be shown that in fulfilling these conditions 
 the artist voluntarily insists upon those subjective elements 
 which distinguish a drawing from the living model, or a 
 picture from the photograph of the model. It is therefore 
 of importance to consider the four factors I have mentioned 
 beauty, composition, expression, and characterisation with 
 some attention. By doing so we shall understand how the 
 subjectivity, the intervenient intelligence and feeling notice- 
 able in the rudest acts of imitation by man, have been 
 elaborated into fine art. 
 
 II 
 
 In a certain sense art can never rival nature in beauty. 
 Man has not the means at his command to do so not the 
 material for sculpture which shall reproduce flesh surface 
 not the pigments for painting which shall render light and 
 darkness, atmosphere and colour, as they truly are. More-
 
 EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 139 
 
 over, man is a part of the universe ; his conceptions of heauty 
 are derived from nature. He is unable to transcend the order 
 which he helps to constitute. Yet, while affirming this, we 
 are bound to acknowledge that man's mind is the most per- 
 fect of existences at present known to us. Being the most 
 perfect, whatsoever is presented to its observation in the ex- 
 ternal world lacks something in comparison with itself. This 
 something it is the proper business of the mind to supply, and 
 the power of supplying it is the justification of the figurative 
 arts. 
 
 There is a beauty which is never found in nature, but which 
 requires a working of human thought to elicit it from nature ; 
 a beauty not of parts and single persons, but of complex 
 totalities ; a beauty not of flesh and blood, but of mind, 
 imagination, feeling. It is this beauty, where the very best 
 things that can be seen in nature have been educed, and, as it 
 were, quintessenced by human thought, expressed in form by 
 human skill, and gifted with immortal life by human genius 
 it is this synthetic, intellectual, spirit-penetrated beauty to 
 which the arts aspire. 
 
 In sculpture Pheidias gives us the frieze of the Parthenon ; 
 in painting Tintoretto gives us the Bacchus and Ariadne of 
 the Ducal Palace. Of the youths who rode and the maidens 
 who walked in a Panathenaic procession, each may have ex- 
 hibited the vigour and the charm of actual life more perfectly 
 than their representatives on those bas-reliefs. But no proces- 
 sion could have made such music to the understanding as the 
 sculpture does. Never could the component individuals have 
 been singly so right, and so right in their relation to the total 
 rhythm. In compensation for that which art must miss when 
 matched with life, something has been added permanent, 
 enduring, tranquil, inexhaustible in harmonies. When we 
 turn to Tintoretto's picture, it is manifest that nature com- 
 monly produces more beautiful hands and feet than those 
 which satisfied the painter. Countless women surpass his 
 Aphrodite and his Ariadne in charm ; nor is the Bacchus an 
 exceptionally handsome youth. We could easily find out 
 more lovely islands and a dreamier expanse of azure sea.
 
 140 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 Yet the world of fact has not revealed to mortal sense such 
 beauty as this picture does ; for form, landscape, colour, the 
 play of light and shadow, have here been brought into con- 
 cordance with a leading tone of intellectual emotion, a per- 
 ception of divine melody existing in the painter's brain. This 
 dominant subjective sense of beauty does not violate the truth 
 of nature ; but it is not to be satisfied at any single moment 
 by external nature ; and it is the prerogative of the human 
 spirit to evoke such dreamland as shall correspond to its deep 
 longing. 
 
 We must advance a step farther, and admit that the mind, 
 reflecting upon nature, and generalising the various sugges- 
 tions of beauty which it has received from nature, becomes 
 aware of an infinity which it can only grasp through thought 
 and feeling, which shall never be fully revealed upon this 
 earth, but which poetry and art bring nearer to our sensuous 
 perceptions. Shelley, personifying this ideal vision, and 
 addressing it as a goddess in his ' Hymn to Intellectual 
 Beauty,' exclaims : 
 
 Man were immortal and omnipotent, 
 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
 Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. 
 
 Wordsworth, in calmer and more humble language, hits the 
 mark when speaking of ' the gleam, the light that never was 
 on sea or land.' Plato thought of this when he explained 
 how the mind ascends from the contemplation of beautiful 
 objects to the vision of beauty in its essence ; and when he 
 suggested, under the form of an allegory, that the soul of man 
 carries with it some remembrance of the archetypal loveliness 
 beheld in previous stages of existence. It is the function of 
 all true art to shed this gleam, this light, upon the things 
 which have been conscientiously and lovingly observed in 
 nature. It is the function of art to give the world a glimpse 
 and foretaste of that universal beauty by selecting from 
 natural objects their choicest qualities, and combining these 
 in a harmony beyond the sphere of actual material things. 
 Of this divine and transcendental loveliness Marlowe pro-
 
 141 
 
 phesied in the sublime incoherence of a well-known passage 
 of his Tamburlaine. ' What is beauty, then ? ' the hero asks : 
 
 If all the pens that ever poets held, 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
 . And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds, and muses on admired themes 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
 The highest reaches of a human wit 
 If these had made one poem's period, 
 And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
 Which into words no virtue can digest. 
 
 There is no denying the reality for us of this ideal. That 
 elusive loveliness which ' hovers in the restless heads ' of 
 poets, may not be something tangible, demonstrable, in 
 nature. But it remains a substantial fact for the subjective 
 sentient being. The thirst to seize and capture it, which 
 lures the artist on, ' for ever following and for ever foiled," is 
 no mere morbid or capricious longing. Given at the same 
 time exactitude of observation, and fidelity to nature, this 
 element, in so far as it has been communicated to his work, 
 constitutes its highest value. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Beauty is so essential a condition of the arts that when we 
 come to treat of composition or design, this has to be con- 
 sidered as a constituent of intellectual beauty. Here, how- 
 ever, we are dealing with something more scientific, something 
 more strictly calculated, something less determined by emotion. 
 Composition implies balance, proportion, symmetry, the 
 subordination of each part to the whole. In figurative art it 
 is a synthesis of lines and masses resulting in a total unity ; 
 but inasmuch as these arts represent nature which is living, the 
 more such synthesis approaches the symmetry of living organ- 
 ism, not that of a geometrical diagram, the better it will be.
 
 142 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 In sculpture the statue must present harmonious develop- 
 ment of structure from every point of view. It must be so 
 composed that its organic unity shall offer a variety of 
 rhythmically ordered outlines, suggesting in one stationary 
 attitude the inexhaustible capacities for action of the living 
 model. This, it may be observed, is one chief reason why 
 heavily draped figures are only adapted to niches. The 
 Sophocles of the Lateran, the Phocion and the Demosthenes 
 of the Vatican, are so ingeniously clothed that none of the 
 resources of the living body remain unindicated. But modern 
 sculptors too often neglect this obvious necessity for com- 
 position in their work. They erect in the open air monu- 
 mental statues like that, for instance, of Lionardo da Vinci 
 upon the Piazza della Scala at Milan which offer an effective 
 front view to the spectator, while the back presents merely 
 a monotonous expanse of drapery. Eecumbent figures upon 
 tombs Gaston de Foix in the Brera, the Cardinal of Portugal 
 at San Miniato, Ilaria del Carretto in the Cathedral of Lucca 
 make less demand upon the faculty of composition, because 
 the attitude is one of sleep or death, and so it need not suggest 
 possibilities of movement. Such works of statuary, moreover, 
 owing to their position, can only be regarded from two or 
 three points of view. 
 
 In painting, the principles of composition are both simpler 
 and more complicated. They are simpler inasmuch as a 
 picture, being a flat superficies, cannot be regarded from 
 several points of view, and therefore the figures which it 
 represents have not to be studied with regard to varied 
 harmony of outline. It is more complicated because form, 
 perspective, colour, light, and shadow are bound to contribute 
 to one effect of unity. In a well-composed picture all these 
 elements must be brought into accord. If we start with the 
 cartoon in outline for a painting, we find that the several forms 
 of which it is composed have been so arranged as to balance 
 each other; the scheme of lines presents agreeable rhythms 
 whereby each part is made subordinate to a totality. If we 
 proceed to a sepia sketch for the same painting, we notice 
 that the unity of effect already gained by interpenetrating
 
 EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 143 
 
 interflowing lines is further strengthened by the distribution 
 of light and dark upon similar principles of balance. When 
 at length we view the picture finished on the painter's easel, 
 we see that colour has been managed upon fundamentally the 
 same principle. Only the greatest masters of the brush have 
 been able to combine perfect balance of form, perfect balance 
 of chiaroscuro, and perfect balance of colour in a single com- 
 position. Sculpturesque painters, like Michel Angelo, attend 
 principally to composition by lines, subordinating the play of 
 light and shadow, and tinting with parsimony or timidity. 
 Some of the less highly gifted Venetian painters, men like 
 Bonifazio, are contented with composition by colour, neglect- 
 ing the balance and grouping of their figures. Tintoretto, 
 who often seems careless about his linear design, obtains 
 the most striking effect of composition by his marvellously 
 powerful distribution of light and dark in counterbalancing 
 masses. Fra Bartolommeo and the Florentines in general 
 rely more than is desirable upon geometrical schemes of 
 linear composition, so that the pyramidal arrangement 
 assmues a kind of tyranny in their paintings. Eubens, with 
 his keen relish for nature, discards this mechanical assistance, 
 trusting to the life which plays so vigorously in each part of 
 his work. Few attain to the consummate artistic harmony 
 which characterises the best pictures of Andrea del Sarto. 
 He seems to deserve his title of ' faultless ' principally by 
 having known how to unite the three elements of composition 
 line, colour, chiaroscuro in reciprocally helpful harmony. 
 
 The necessity for composition in art might be deduced not 
 only from the natural craving of the mind after symmetry 
 and rhythm, but also from art's relative incapacity to rival 
 nature. The model is in movement, the multitude is swaying 
 to and fro, the landscape varies with cloud-shadows and 
 changing atmospheric effects ; but statue and picture must 
 be stationary. They arrest the life of Nature at an instant ; 
 they select one suggestion from the multiplicity of her sugges- 
 tions ; they are symbols, and not copies of the object as it 
 meets our sensuous perception. Art is accordingly bound to 
 introduce an equivalent for what it cannot represent. Like
 
 144 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 ideal beauty, composition is a compensation offered to the 
 subjectivity of man. From this we might once more deduce 
 the corollary that art cannot abide contented with bare imita- 
 tion. Man's soul speaks to man's soul from the picture, and 
 says something which nature does not say. 
 
 No one will, however, deny that everywhere in nature, 
 especially in sublime landscape or in exceptionally perfect 
 single figures, the most consummate composition may be 
 observed. In nature, however, such composition is fugitive. 
 We return to the landscape and find that altered light or 
 atmosphere has spoiled the picture ; the linear balance is still 
 there, the rest has vanished. The model drops an upraised 
 arm, and the momentary magic of his attitude, complete in 
 sculpturesque variety of rhythm, is dispersed. It is the artist's 
 duty, while making himself the secretary of Nature's shyest 
 thoughts and the interpreter of her secluded mysteries, to 
 perpetuate these fugitive perfections in work which cannot 
 pass away. While assuming this function he collaborates 
 with Nature, and becomes himself, through the infusion of his 
 spirit, a portion of the picture he produces. 
 
 IV 
 
 This leads us to consider expression as one of the factors 
 which constitute the so-called ideality of art. Expression, 
 in its relation to sculpture and painting, is a word of double 
 meaning. It may mean the expression which resides in the 
 object itself, which the artist seeks to seize and to render as 
 powerfully as he can the expression which belongs to a 
 good portrait. Or it may mean the expression of subjective 
 thought and feeling, not inherent in the object, for which the 
 forms of art are vehicles. I shall deal at present only with 
 expression in the second of these senses. 
 
 I need not observe that much difference of opinion exists 
 as to whether artists ought to aim deliberately at expressing 
 thoughts and emotions. The elder schools of criticism 
 assumed, perhaps too confidently, that such expression is 
 the ultimate end and highest function of art. They could
 
 EXPEESSION, CHARACTERISATION 145 
 
 point, in justification of this view, to the best examples of 
 Hellenic sculpture and Italian painting. It is obvious that 
 both Greeks and Italians aimed at embodying psychological 
 qualities nicely discriminated, powerfully marked, and subtly 
 graduated, in their work. The Italians went farther, and 
 attempted to set forth episodes of religious and secular 
 history with dramatic vividness. But younger students of 
 the arts advance a counter theory, to the effect that it is not 
 the prime function of the fine arts to externalise a thought 
 or an emotion, so much as to create beautiful schemes of 
 form, colour, light and shade, in harmony with nature. 
 These critics support their opinion by pointing to the failure 
 of dramatic, historical, religious, sentimental art-work during 
 the last two centuries. In fact, we are here once more facing 
 the old antithesis of idealism and realism under another 
 aspect. As before, the problem must be met and dealt with 
 by a clear intelligence of terms and a perception of the 
 correlation between apparent opposites. 
 
 I have already tried to .establish the principle that every 
 product of figurative art, however simple, is subject to con- 
 ditions which differentiate a draughtsman from a machine. 
 It must reveal something of the nature of personal thought 
 and feeling. The only question is how far this revelation or 
 expression can be legitimately carried ; whether it should be 
 left to the spontaneous exhibition of the artist's temperament 
 through style, or whether the artist should aim at uttering 
 the thought of his brain, the emotion of his heart, through 
 forms selected with deliberate intention for the purpose. 
 
 This question turns first upon the choice of subjects and 
 the artist's faculty to grapple with them ; secondly, upon the 
 consideration whether there are not limits to art which render 
 some subjects, although legitimate enough in poetry or fiction, 
 unfit for figurative presentation. 
 
 There can be no doubt that when Pheidias planned the 
 Olympian Zeus, which typified the Supreme Deity for Hellas, 
 he intended to express as much definite specific thought as 
 he could put into a noble figure. There can be equally no 
 doubt that Lionardo's Christ in the Last Supper, Raphael's 
 
 L
 
 146 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 Madonna di San Sisto, Tintoretto's Christ before Pilate, 
 are attempts upon the part of their respective painters to 
 express thoughts no less definite and specific. Whatever 
 other excellences these masterpieces may display, their crown- 
 ing merit in their makers' eyes was certainly expression. 
 We cannot name a Faun, a Hermes, an Aphrodite, a Pallas, 
 among Greek statues, not a S. Sebastian, a S. John, a 
 Magdalene, a Catherine of Siena, among Italian pictures, 
 which does not express some salient subjective quality. The 
 main difference between Greek and Italian work in this 
 respect is that the Pagan mythology lent itself better than 
 the Christian to artistic characterisation. What I mean is 
 that the Greek Pantheon contained an inexhaustible number 
 of clearly-marked and well-distinguished personalities; the 
 several qualities of human nature were presented in concrete 
 form by those ideal beings, each of whom had a separate 
 legend. Christian saints, upon the other hand, are all formed 
 upon one model of holiness, faith, humility, self-sacrifice, 
 chastity, and so forth. As Goethe remarked to Eckermann, 
 while showing him a group of Christ with the Twelve 
 Apostles : ' These forms are but poor subjects for sculpture. 
 One apostle is always much like another, and very few have 
 enough life and action connected with them to give them 
 character and significance.' It follows, therefore, that 
 whereas Here, Aphrodite, Artemis, Pallas, can be at once 
 distinguished by the type invented for them by the artist, it 
 is necessary to give S. Catherine of Alexandria a broken 
 wheel, S. Sebastian an arrow, S. Agnes a lamb, S. Lucy 
 a pair of eyes upon a plate, in order to explain them. 
 But to return from this excursion. Expression obviously 
 determines the composition of the Dying Gladiator, the 
 Laocoon, the mosaic of the Battle of the Issus, the fresco of 
 the Bridal in the Vatican. No less does expression rule 
 Eaphael's School of Athens, Tintoretto's Crucifixion at San 
 Eocco, Giotto's allegories at Assisi, Michel Angelo's Sibyls 
 and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel. These statues and 
 pictures must always be classed among the highest achieve- 
 ments of art, and they owe their rank to the fact that, in each
 
 147 
 
 case, sculptor and painter aimed consciously at expressing 
 certain thoughts and certain emotions. 
 
 Another list of examples might be adduced from antique 
 and modern masterpieces, in which the expression of ideas 
 would not be so obvious. I will select the Apoxyomenos of 
 the Vatican (a young athlete scraping his right arm with the 
 strigil), and Tintoretto's Bacchus and Ariadne. Personally, I 
 prefer this statue and this picture to any other statues and 
 any other pictures I have seen ; and I am well aware that 
 they affect me intellectually and emotionally, only in the 
 same subtle way as music does. In other words, they express 
 things vaguer, more remote, but not less real to the soul, 
 than thought and language do. The secret of their power, 
 is the communication of a mood. This does not, then, 
 reverse the position that the figurative arts are arts of 
 expression. Definitely or vaguely, with deliberate intention 
 or by spontaneous suggestiveness, the work of art speaks to 
 our spirit. 
 
 To be dramatic is not the prime function of the figurative 
 arts. They cannot imitate the suffering depicted on the face 
 of a man who is being tortured to death. They cannot rival 
 the natural look of terror in a man threatened with sudden 
 assassination. They cannot do these things with success, and 
 therefore they ought to refrain from the attempt. That 
 is the reason why the Laocoon, though dramatically and 
 realistically feeble, exceeds the bounds of sculpturesque 
 expression, while Titian's Peter Martyr trembled dangerously 
 on the verge of the theatrical. But within their limits of 
 harmonious beauty, of composition and of rhythmic repose, 
 these arts can suggest action, passion, struggle, aspiration, 
 anguish, with a penetrative depth which rescues such motions 
 of the soul from the sphere of the transitory, and confers on 
 them the permanence of style. 
 
 Since the publication by Lessing of his Laocoon, this 
 limitation of the plastic arts has been accepted as axiomatic, 
 and its truth is daily proved by the study of the best work. 
 I believe, however, that the same principle might equally well 
 be deduced from the fact on which I have so often insisted, 
 
 1,2
 
 148 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 namely, the relative inferiority of art to nature. Incapable 
 of rivalling reality in its own sphere, the arts assert com- 
 pensatory advantages, by the adroit use of their limitations 
 and by the introduction of subjective elements. Among the 
 latter have to be reckoned the controlling sense of beauty 
 and the feeling for composition on which I have already 
 dwelt, together with those qualities of sympathy, reserve, 
 delicacy, self-restraint, those preferences for refinement, those 
 tendencies making for spiritual progress rather than for 
 relapse into bestial conditions, which constitute humanity. 
 It is obvious that no art is capable of adequately imitating 
 the agony depicted on the face of a man dying a slow death 
 by torture, because it cannot follow all the phases of that 
 agony. It dares not represent some of the more revolting 
 details of crucifixion, for example proluvies ventris et vesica 
 dislocation of limbs by restless writhing, spasmodic con- 
 vulsion of nerves and muscles. It is both unable and unwill- 
 ing to carry expression to extremity. Here, then, as else- 
 where, lack of power to be literally realistic combines with 
 the display of subjectivity, and we reach the artistic mean in 
 idealistic representation. 
 
 Characterisation is no longer the expression of a thought 
 or feeling, a passion or a sentiment, intended by the artist 
 and impressed upon his transcript from the model. It implies 
 an effort to penetrate and then to represent the essential 
 character of his model in the most forcible way. In its 
 highest form it exercises the imaginative faculty possessed by 
 the greater portrait painters, which enables them to pierce 
 below the surface, and to use the physical as index to the 
 spiritual qualities of men and women. It may, however, be 
 limited to the vigorous delineation of salient points, and to 
 the accentuation of marked peculiarities. In the latter case 
 characterisation borders upon caricature. In all cases it 
 implies a willing sacrifice of superficial beauty for the sake 
 of force and uncompromising veracity. Through vigorous 
 characterisation, through the mental power displayed in it,
 
 EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 149 
 
 ugliness may be raised to sublimity, and even the revolting 
 may obtain the power to fascinate. Instead of being realistic, 
 this is one of the most idealistic functions of art. The 
 dwarfs of Velasquez Titian's terrible old woman with the 
 scroll ' Col Tempo ' cannot be claimed by realism. The 
 intensity of selective insight exhibited in these works places 
 them in the ideal category as surely as any Genius by Michel 
 Angelo upon the vaulting of the Sistine Chapel. Interpre- 
 tation of the object reaches its climax here. 
 
 VI 
 
 It will seem, I expect, to many of my readers that I have 
 been eleborately proving a truism in the foregoing pages, the 
 aim of my argument being to show that art cannot dispense 
 with an element of ideality or exist apart from the expression 
 of thought or feeling. Still it is always well, in matters so 
 intangible as aesthetic criticism, to start by claiming nothing 
 which does not admit of demonstration. The less we 
 postulate, the firmer will our ground be in the future. 
 
 The final truth impressed upon my own mind by the 
 analysis attempted in these three essays is that everything 
 which man can do in imitation of nature falls short of the fact, 
 as fact. We cannot make the image of a tree, or a flower, or 
 a man, which shall yield us one-tenth part of the pleasure or 
 the wonder which the sight of the tree, the flower, the living 
 man yields. Who can reproduce by pigments the luminous 
 texture of a lily chalice or the sheeny velvet of a pelargonium 
 petal ? It is impossible to relate a story or to act a drama 
 which shall contain as much of poignant interest as what 
 happens daily to thousands of our fellow -creatures on this 
 planet. The whole hell of Dante is as nothing in sheer 
 intensity when tested by the night hours of a tortured con- 
 , science ? and even Sappho's odes seem calm beside a lover's 
 actual palpitations. Therefore this function of man's intellect, 
 called art, and classified since Aristotle's epoch under the title 
 of Imitation, is, in comparison with the object imitated, 'as 
 moonlight unto sunlight, as water unto wine.'
 
 160 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 As a merely mimetic process, art is so conspicuously a 
 failure, whether we take drama, lyric, work of fiction, statue, 
 or painting into account, that its pretension to be realistic in 
 the technical sense of that word must pass for a piece of 
 impertinence and self-inflated ignorance. Aristotle has much 
 to answer for, since he it was who first used the phrase 
 Mimesis, or imitation, and treated the arts from that starting- 
 point. He set reflection on the wrong track, instead of 
 making it at once clear that we must look for something 
 else in the arts, and that imitation is only a condition under 
 which they partially fulfil their common task. 
 
 It is indeed the duty of all arts faithfully to follow in the 
 steps of Nature, to create nothing without her sanction, to 
 read her book at morn, and noon, and eventide, and never 
 to deviate from her teaching. But they must resign the 
 attempt to do again what Nature does. They must give 
 up the ambition to be unconditionally realistic, flawlessly 
 naturalistic. They must recognise the fact that they cannot 
 rival the sun in his draughtmanship, or the mirror-surface of 
 a mountain tarn in its veracity of reproduction. 
 
 To humbler functions, awful power, 
 I call tbee I 
 
 Yes, indeed, to functions humbler in one sense, but loftier 
 in another, for art obeys the freedom of the spirit, and is 
 restrained by limitations very different in quality from those 
 necessities under which mechanical copies of nature are 
 evolved. 
 
 The whole province of the human intellect and emotion 
 is art's sphere, wherein to expatiate with the untrammelled 
 liberty and creative power of mind. Not the heights alone, 
 but the depths also of humanity lie unveiled before the artist. 
 The forms he uses are but symbols, whereby he speaks as 
 soul to soul. To him it is given to effect a real new birth of 
 beauty, by baptizing nature in the rivers of the spirit. To 
 him again it is given to display the moral ugliness of vice, 
 the pathos of suffering, the tragic fate of heroes. Nothing 
 within the range of man's capacity is wholly alien to art.
 
 EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 151 
 
 Great races have consigned their most earnest aspirations, 
 their strivings after a solution of ' the riddle of this painful 
 earth,' their inflexible codes of conduct, to the forms of art ; 
 and naught survives of them but sphinx-like figures carved 
 on rocks in wildernesses, or mystic shapes half buried in the 
 tangles of primeval forests. Yet from these dead stones the 
 spirit still speaks through art, still tells us by what faiths 
 those men who were our ancestors both lived and died. Nor 
 this alone, but whatsoever is capricious, fascinating, super- 
 ficially delightful, evanescently fragrant to the soul in reverie, 
 obeys the artist's touch. And the lyre of art is an instrument 
 of five chords. Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, 
 music, are the strings upon which the genius of art plays, 
 according to the diverse nature of the spiritual message which 
 human mind conveys to mind through sensuous impressions. 
 Only two of these are bound to imitation of the outer world ; 
 and they use imitation for the utterance of what is integral 
 with mind. 
 
 It is the privilege of art to quicken feeling, and to lead our 
 soul through all the labyrinths of life as in a vision. Sculpture 
 and painting, in particular, teach us to see what is noteworthy 
 in the form of man and in the face of nature. Not many 
 weeks ago, I walked in the light of a mellow July sunset 
 along the Serpentine, watching the crowd of men and lads 
 who bathe there. I recognised how impossible it would be to 
 reproduce in its complexity of interest and beauty what I saw 
 before me the space, the atmosphere, the massive trees, the 
 luminosity of sky above, the sheeny, troubled surface of the 
 pond, and above all, the innumerable groups and changeful 
 attitudes of naked men in every posture. And yet, at the 
 same time, it was borne in upon my mind that only through 
 the service of art, through the labour of Greek sculptors and 
 the industry of modern painters, was I at the proper point for 
 discerning what this common scene contained of beauty and 
 of interest. No painting could place in right relation to the 
 whole and to the parts the multiplicity of marvels it offered 
 to my vision. No sculpture could fix and perpetuate the grace 
 inseparable from movement in those men and lads. But except
 
 152 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 
 
 for years of training under this influence, should I have had the 
 eyes to see and the spirit to admire what was revealed to me ? 
 
 Art satisfies the desire of man for fidelity of record, for 
 excellence of workmanship, and for permanence. It gratifies 
 our sense of ingenuity. It enables us to enjoy summer in 
 winter, poetry among prosaic circumstances, the country in 
 the town, woodland and river in the sick-room, open air and 
 joyousness in prisons or in what is often tantamount to 
 prison, in our daily life. All this it achieves by means of its 
 wonderful shadow-work of forms ; and it can do this, as 
 nature cannot, for generations which succeed each other like 
 the leaves of kindly seasons. It is even more poignant than 
 nature, by reason of the sympathy between the artist's mind 
 and ours. It satisfies the infantine and ever-present longing 
 for romance in human hearts the thirst to view things nobler 
 and less tiresome than we hourly find them ; the yearning 
 for companionship with heroic souls ; the hunger to be bathed 
 in turbulent passions and be purified by their expansion ; the 
 aspiration to behold the world more clearly and with deeper 
 intuition ; the curiosity to be present at perilous adventures 
 and at the crisis of great destinies, if only in a vision. It 
 fills up, in one word, that void of our daily experience, which 
 is alluded to in the French saying : ' Eien n'est si joli que la 
 fable, si triste que la v^riteV 
 
 The world which art creates for us is like the Greek 
 Elysium. In it exist the unsubstantial shades. 
 
 Of all that is most beauteous imaged there 
 
 In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, 
 
 An ample ether, a diviner air, 
 
 And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; 
 
 Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day 
 
 Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. 
 
 Human tragedies removed into this Elysian sphere lose their 
 brutality, and shock our sense no longer. Human joys are 
 divested of their crude excitement. The aesthetic emotion 
 does not stimulate pain or pleasure in the same degree as the 
 immediate emotions. Consequently, it does not lead to 
 action, whether of pursuit or of avoidance. The self within 
 us, powerfully played upon by images of suffering or delight,
 
 EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 153 
 
 remains quiescent, sterile of endeavour, steeped in the lumi- 
 nous atmosphere of reverie. The beautiful, as Kant said, is 
 the object of a disinterested satisfaction. And this is probably 
 what Aristotle had in his mind when he defined the end of 
 tragedy to be a purification of the emotions through pity and 
 terror. 
 
 ' To allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affec- 
 tions in right tune,' wrote Milton in his panegyric of the 
 poet's function. Before entering art's Elysium, the life of 
 man drinks Lethe ; we know that sorrows will be tempered 
 there to sadness, acute passions robbed of their sting, memo- 
 ries refined to a faint echo of experience. Yet though the 
 emotions stimulated by art are unfruitful of act, sterile of 
 energy, purged of their selfish element, they are none the less 
 real and serious. They possess a notable power over the 
 formation of character. One effect of art has been too little 
 observed by writers upon ethics. It is the arousing in us of 
 what may be called indefinite illimitable desire. A desire 
 which is tyrannous, precisely because it is vague, because its 
 rhythms, excited by intangibilities, react upon the finest and 
 remotest fibres of our being. The bearing of this remark can 
 best perhaps be illustrated by an example. Hazlitt relates 
 that, when he read the last scene between the lovers in 
 Schiller's Don Carlos, he was left with ' a deep sense of suffer- 
 ing and a strong desire after good, which has haunted me 
 ever since.' Those words sufficiently describe the stirring of 
 the soul effected by great art ; and upon the moral quality of 
 the work of art which stimulates this indefinite desire, will 
 depend much of the moral temper of the man who feels it. 
 The desire haunts him through his life, and is rooted in the 
 recollection of the work which called it forth. It may be 
 the pathos of Cordelia's death in King Lear which evoked 
 the emotion ; it may be Plato's rapturous description of love 
 in the Phcedrus. We may owe its presence in our being to 
 the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, or we may derive it from 
 
 That most perfect of antiques 
 They call the Genius of the Vatican, 
 Which seems too beauteous to endure itself 
 In this mixed world.
 
 154 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION 
 
 As dreams of the night bring us home to ourselves and 
 discover hidden fountain-heads of passion, so this indefinite 
 illimitable desire, which art excites, creates for those who feel 
 it lasting habits of emotion. The recurrent vibrations of that 
 desire, the persistent images with which it is connected, the 
 mode in which we have been touched to fine pervasive 
 spiritual issues, remain with us for good or evil, abiding 
 witnesses to art's controlling power. 
 
 But how is art enabled to do all this ? Not by rivalling 
 the draughtsmanship of the sun and the accuracy of a 
 mechanical process. Nay, rather by the exercise of human 
 faculties alone purged insight, fiery yet patient imagination, 
 earnest thought, love of the best things, ever-eager selection 
 of the highest man can rise to, strong planning and strenuous 
 application to the execution of the plan. The whole 
 macrocosm and all creatures of God, from the cedar of 
 Libanus to the hyssop upon the wall, from Priam among the 
 burning palaces of Troy-town to the boors of a Dutch tavern, 
 from an Olympian athlete to an idle apprentice, from Achilles 
 and S. Francis to Tom Jones and Parson Andrews, lie open to 
 artistic representation. The artist at any hour calls up scenes 
 we cannot see with our own eyes. He transports us from 
 Camberwell to Athens, from Baker Street to the Great 
 Pyramid, from a ball in Belgravia to the dances of Titania's 
 elves. Yet the magic wand of this Prospero is nothing else 
 but the artist's own mind, which stirs our mind and puts 
 before our eyes the vision. Try as he may do to escape from 
 the conditions under which he labours, he will find that 
 he does not make things as they are, but as they exist for his 
 consciousness ; and all his realistic skill must finally subserve 
 the expression of the thought and the emotion which himself 
 contains.
 
 CABICATUEE, THE FANTASTIC, 
 THE GEOTESQUE 
 
 CARICATURE is a distinct species of characterisation, in 
 which the salient features of a person or an object have been 
 emphasised with the view of rendering them ridiculous. The 
 derivation of this word justifies my definition. It comes from 
 the Italian caricare, to charge with a burden, or to surcharge, 
 Thus caricare un ritratto means to exaggerate what is already 
 prominent in the model, and in this way to produce a likeness 
 which misrepresents the person, while it remains recog- 
 nisable. Instead of emphasis, simple distortion may be used 
 to secure the effect of caricature. For example, the hints 
 suggested by reflection in a spoon are amplified into an 
 absurd portrait. Some faces and figures lend themselves 
 better to the concave, others to the convex surface of the 
 spoon. Or a fairly accurate image of a man or woman, 
 modelled in gutta-percha, may be pulled about in various 
 directions, with the result of producing a series of burlesque 
 portraits, in which the likeness of the individual is never 
 wholly lost. 
 
 The most effective kind of caricature does not proceed by 
 such distortion. It renders its victim ludicrous or vile by 
 exaggerating what is defective, mean, ignoble in his person, 
 indicating at the same time that some corresponding flaws 
 in his spiritual nature are revealed by them. The master- 
 pieces of this art are those in which truth has been 
 accentuated by slight but deft and telling emphasis. Nothing, 
 as Aretino once remarked, is more cruel than malevolent
 
 156 CARICATURE, 
 
 insistence upon fact. You cannot injure your neighbour 
 better than by telling the truth about him, if the truth is to 
 his discredit. You cannot make him appear ridiculous more 
 crushingly than by calling attention to real faults in his 
 physique. 
 
 Those extraordinary caricatures of human faces which 
 Lionardo da Vinci delighted to produce, illustrate both 
 methods of emphasis and distortion. But they also exhibit 
 the play of a fantastic imagination. He accentuated the 
 analogies of human with bestial features, or degraded his 
 models to the level of goitred idiots by subtle blurrings and 
 erasures of their nobler traits. 
 
 Caricature is not identical with satire. Caricature implies 
 exaggeration of some sort. The bitterest satire hits its 
 mark by no exaggeration, but by indignant and unmerciful 
 exposure of ignobility. Yet caricature has always been used 
 for satirical purposes, with notable effect by Aristophanes in 
 his political comedies, with coarse vigour by Gilray in 
 lampoons of the last century, with indulgent humour by our 
 contemporary ' Punch.' 
 
 The real aim of caricature is to depreciate its object by 
 evoking contempt or stirring laughter, when the imaginative 
 rendering of the person is an unmistakable portrait, but 
 defects are brought into relief which might otherwise have 
 escaped notice. Instead therefore of being realistic, this 
 branch of art must be reckoned as essentially idealistic. In 
 so far as a caricature is powerfully conceived, it calls into 
 play fine, though never the noblest, never the most amiable, 
 qualities of interpretation. 
 
 II 
 
 The fantastic need have no element of caricature. It 
 invariably implies a certain exaggeration or distortion of 
 nature ; but it lacks that deliberate intention to disparage 
 which lies at the root of caricature. What we call fantastic 
 in art results from an exercise of the capricious fancy, playing 
 with things which it combines into arbitrary non-existent 
 forms. These may be merely graceful, as is the case with
 
 167 
 
 arabesques devised by old Italian painters frescoed patterns 
 upon walls and ceilings, in which tendrils of the vine, 
 acanthus foliage, parts of beasts and men and birds and 
 fabulous creatures are brought into quasi-organic fusion 
 with candelabra, goblets, lyres, and other familiar objects of 
 utility. 
 
 In its higher manifestations fantastic art creates beautiful 
 or terrific forms in correspondence with some vision of the 
 excited imagination. The sphinx and the dragon, the world- 
 snake of Scandinavian mythology, Shakespeare's Ariel, 
 Dante's Lucifer, are fantastic in this higher sense. In them 
 real conditions of man's subjective being have taken sensuous 
 shape at the bidding of creative genius. The artist, while 
 giving birth to such fantastic creatures of imagination, 
 resembles a deeply-stirred and dreaming man, whose brain 
 projects impossible shapes to symbolise the perturbations of 
 his spirit. Myth and allegory, the metamorphosis of mortals 
 into plants, fairies, satyrs, nymphs, and tutelary deities of sea 
 or forest, are examples of the fantastic in this sphere of 
 highest poetry. 
 
 According to the view which I have just expressed, 
 fantastic art has to be considered as the least realistic of all 
 artistic species ; it is that in which the human mind shows 
 its ideality, its subjective freedom, its independence of fact 
 and external nature, most completely. Here a man's studies 
 of reality outside him, acute and penetrating as these may 
 be, become subservient to the presentation of thoughts 
 and emotions which have no validity except for his internal 
 consciousness. 
 
 He will watch from dawn till gloom 
 
 The lake-reflected sun illume 
 
 The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, 
 
 Nor heed nor see what things they be, 
 
 But from these create he can 
 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 
 Nurslings of immortality. 
 
 When well constructed, powerfully conceived, vigorously 
 projected, with sufficiency of verisimilitude to give them
 
 158 CARICATURE, 
 
 rank among extraordinary phenomena, and with sufficient 
 correspondence to the natural moods of human thought, 
 these phantasies and their appropriate shapes acquire a 
 reality of their own, and impose upon the credulity of man- 
 kind. They are felt to be actual through the force with 
 which their makers felt them, and through their adaptation 
 to the fancies of imaginative minds in general. Thus the 
 chimaera of Hellenic sculpture, the horned and hoofed devil 
 of mediaeval painting, Shakespeare's Caliban, Milton's Death, 
 Goethe's Mephistopheles, can all be claimed as products of 
 fantastic art. Yet these figments are hardly less real for our 
 consciousness than the Farnese bull, Lancelot, Landseer's 
 stags, Hamlet, Dr. Brown's Eab, Adam Bede, and other 
 products of imaginative art which are modelled from familiar 
 objects. In this way fantastic art strikingly brings home to 
 us the truth of what Tasso once said : Non & creatore se non 
 Iddio ed il poeta (God and the poet are the only creators). 
 It does this because it proves that the recombining power of 
 the imagination, as in dreams, so also in poetry and plastic 
 art, is able to construct unrealities which possess even more 
 than the spiritual influence and all but the validity of fact for 
 human minds. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The grotesque is a branch of the fantastic. Its specific 
 difference lies in the fact that an element of caricature, 
 whether deliberately intended or imported by the craftsman's 
 spontaneity of humour, forms an ingredient in the thing 
 produced. Certain races and certain epochs display a pre- 
 dilection for the grotesque, which is conspicuously absent in 
 others. Hellenic art, I think, was never intentionally grotesque, 
 except on rare occasions in the comedy of Aristophanes. 
 What resembles grotesqueness in the archaic stages of Greek 
 sculpture in the bas-reliefs from Selinus, for example 
 must be ascribed to naiveii and lack of technical skill. On 
 the contrary, Lombard sculpture, as we study this on the 
 fa9ades of North Italian churches, and mediaeval Teutonic 
 art in general, as we study this upon the pages of illustrated
 
 THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 169 
 
 manuscripts, in the choir-stalls of our cathedrals, or in the 
 carven ornaments of their exteriors, rarely fails to introduce 
 some grotesque element. The free play of the Northern 
 fancy ran over easily into distortion, degradation of form, 
 burlesque. Scandinavian poetry of the best period exhibits 
 striking specimens of Aristophanic satire, in which the gods 
 are mercilessly dealt with. Grotesqueness may be traced in 
 all the fantastic beings of Celtic and Germanic folk-lore in 
 gnomes inhabiting the mountains, in kelpies of the streams 
 and mermaids of the ocean, in Puck and Eobin Goodfellow, 
 in fairies of heath and woodland, in the princesses of Border 
 ballad-literature fated by magic spells to dree their doom as 
 loathly dragons. 
 
 Of such grotesqueness I doubt whether we can discern a 
 trace in classical mythology and art. Ugly stories about 
 Zeus and Cronos, quaint stories about the metamorphoses of 
 Proteus, and the Phorcydes with their one eye, are not 
 grotesque. They lack the touch of caricature, always a 
 conscious or semi-conscious element, which is needful to 
 create the species. 
 
 This element is absent in the voluminous literature of 
 the Arabs, as that is known to us through the 'Arabian 
 Nights.' Princesses transformed into parrots, djinns with 
 swarthy faces doting on fair damsels, water-carriers con- 
 verted by some spell into caliphs, ghouls, animals that talk, 
 immense birds brooding over treasures in the wilderness, are 
 not grotesque. They lack the touch of conscious caricature 
 added to free fancy which differentiates the species. 
 
 Both caricature and the fantastic played an important part 
 in Southern and Eastern literature, but they did not come 
 into the peculiar connection which is necessary to grotesque- 
 ness. The fantastic made itself moderately felt in Hellas, 
 and assumed gigantic proportions in Islam. The Asiatic and 
 Greek minds, however, lacked a quality which was demanded in 
 order to elicit grotesqueness from phantasy. That quality the 
 Teutonic section of the Aryan family possessed in abundance ; 
 it was all-pervasive in the products of their genius. We may 
 define it broadly as humour. I do not deny humour to the
 
 160 CARICATURE, 
 
 Greeks and Orientals ; but I contend that Teutons have the 
 merit of applying humour to caricature and the fantastic, 
 so as to educe from both in combination what we call 
 grotesqueness. 
 
 For obvious reasons I must omit all mention of what 
 strikes us as grotesque in the art-work of races with whom 
 we are imperfectly in sympathy. Hindoo idols, Chinese and 
 Japanese bronzes, Aztec bas-reliefs, and such things, seem 
 to us grotesque. But it is almost impossible to decide how 
 far this apparent grotesqueness is due to inadequate com- 
 prehension on our part, or to religious symbolism. We cannot 
 eliminate the element of genuine intentional grotesqueness 
 which things so far remote from us contain. 
 
 IV 
 
 Closely allied to caricature and the grotesque we find 
 obscenity. This indeed has generally entered into both. 
 The reason is not far to seek. Nothing exposes human 
 beings to more contemptuous derision than the accentuation 
 in their persons of that which self-respect induces them to 
 hide. Indecency is therefore a powerful resource for satirical 
 caricaturists. Nothing, again, in the horse-play of the fancy 
 comes readier to hand than the burlesque exhibition of things 
 usually concealed. It appeals to the gross natural man, upon 
 whose sense of humour the creator of grotesque imagery 
 wishes to work, and with whom he is in cordial sympathy. 
 
 Indecency has always been extruded from the temple of 
 art, and relegated to slums and dubious places in its precincts. 
 Why is this ? Perhaps it would suffice to answer that art is a 
 mirror of human life, and that those things which we exclude 
 from social intercourse are consequently excluded from the 
 aesthetic domain. This is an adequate account of the matter. 
 But something will be gained for the understanding of art in 
 general if we examine the problem with more attention. 
 
 Shelley lays it down as an axiom that all obscenity implies 
 a crime against the spiritual nature of man. This dictum 
 takes for granted an advanced state of society, when merely
 
 161 
 
 sensual functions have come to be regarded with sensitive 
 modesty. In other words, it defines the essence of obscenity 
 to be some cynical or voluptuous isolation of what is animal 
 in man, for special contemplation by the mind. Savages 
 recognise nothing indecent in things which we consider highly 
 improper. Our ancestors spoke without a blush about matters 
 which could not now be mentioned before a polite company. 
 This is because savages and people of the Elizabethan age 
 were naive, where we have become self-conscious. Thus 
 Shelley's crimen lasa majestatis varies with the age and the 
 conditions of civility in which men live. Much that is 
 treasonable here and now against the spiritual nature of 
 humanity was unassailable two hundred years ago, and is still 
 respectable in the tropics. The point at issue is to decide 
 what constitutes a violation of local and temporal decorum 
 in this respect. Such violation is obscenity ; and the con- 
 ditions vary almost imperceptibly with the growth of society, 
 but always in favour of decorum. 
 
 There are many things allowable, nay laudable, in act, 
 which it is unpermissible to represent in figurative art or to 
 dwell upon in poetry. Yet these things imply nothing ugly. 
 On the contrary, they are compatible with the highest degree 
 of natural beauty. Even Aretino's famous postures, if painted 
 with the passion of Giorgione, could not be pronounced 
 unbeautiful. Such motives abound in juxtapositions of forms 
 and in contrasts of physical types, which yield everything the 
 painter most desires for achieving his most ambitious triumphs. 
 The delineation of these things, however, though they are 
 allowable and laudable in act, though they are plastically 
 beautiful, offends our taste and is intolerable. If we ask why 
 this is so, the answer, I think, must be that civilisation only 
 accepts art under the condition of its making for the nobler 
 tendencies of human nature. In truth, I have approached 
 the present topic, in spite of its difficulty, mainly because it 
 confirms the views I hold regarding the dependence of the 
 arts on ethics. 
 
 There are acts necessary to the preservation of the species, 
 functions important in the economy of man ; but these, by 
 
 M
 
 162 CARICATURE, 
 
 a tacit consensus of opinion, we refuse to talk about, and 
 these therefore we are unwilling to see reflected in art's 
 spiritual looking-glass. We grudge their being brought into 
 the sphere of intellectual things. We feel that the representa- 
 tion of them, implying as this does the working of the artist's 
 mind and our mind on them, contradicts a self-preservative 
 instinct which has been elaborately cultivated through un- 
 numbered generations for the welfare of the social organism. 
 Such representation brings before the sense in figure what is 
 already powerful enough in fact. It stirs in us what educa- 
 tion tends to curb, and exposes what humane culture teaches 
 us to withdraw from observation. 
 
 This position admits of somewhat different statement. At 
 a certain point art must make common cause with morality, 
 and the plastically beautiful has to be limited by ethical laws. 
 Man is so complex a being, and in the complex of his nature 
 the morally-trained sensibilities play so prominent a part, that 
 art, which aims at giving only elevated enjoyment, cannot 
 neglect ethics. Without being didactic it must be moralised, 
 because the normal man is moralised. If it repudiates this 
 obligation, it errs against its own ideal of harmony, rhythm, 
 repose, synthetic beauty. It introduces an element which we 
 seek to subordinate in life, and by which we are afraid of 
 being mastered. It ceases to be adequate to humanity in its 
 best moments, and these best moments art has undertaken to 
 present in forms of sensuous but dignified loveliness. 
 
 Most people will agree upon this point. There remains, 
 however, considerable difference of opinion as to the bound- 
 aries which art dares not overpass as to what deserves the 
 opprobrious title of indecency in plastic or poetic presenta- 
 tion. Some folk seem inclined to ban the nude without 
 exception, relegating the grandest handiwork of God, the 
 human form divine, to the obscurity of shrouded vestments. 
 Disinclined as I am to adopt this extreme position, I admit 
 that just here the cleanness or uncleanness of the artist's mind, 
 as felt in his touch on doubtful subjects, becomes a matter 
 of ethical importance. All depends on taste, on method of 
 treatment, on the tone communicated, on the mood in which
 
 163 
 
 matters of delicacy have been viewed. Tintoretto elevates 
 our imagination by his pictures of Eve tempting Adam ; 
 Michel Angelo restrains and chastens wandering fancy ; 
 Raphael removes the same theme beyond the sphere of 
 voluptuous suggestion, while retaining something of its sen- 
 suous allurement ; Rembrandt produces a cynical satire in 
 the style of Swift's description of Yahoos ; Luca Giordano 
 disgusts by coarse and full-blown carnalism. 
 
 These considerations lead us finally to inquire in what 
 sphere of human sensibility the arts legitimately move. 
 
 It is usual to distinguish between aesthetic and non- 
 sesthetic senses meaning by the former sight and hearing, 
 by the latter touch, taste, smell. In truth, no great art has 
 yet been based upon the three last-mentioned senses, in the 
 same way as painting and sculpture have been based on sight 
 and music upon hearing. This is because the two so-called 
 aesthetic senses are links between what is spiritual in us and 
 external nature ; we use them in the finer operations of our 
 intelligence. The three non-aesthetic senses serve utility and 
 natural needs ; they have not been brought into that comity 
 where thought and emotion can be sensuously presented to 
 the mind. It is only by the faintest suggestions that a touch, 
 a taste, a smell evokes some spiritual mood. When it does 
 so the effect is indeed striking ; we are thrilled in our very 
 entrails and marrow. But these suggestions are, in our 
 present condition, so vague, so elusive, so evanescent, so 
 peculiar to the individual, that no attempt has been made to 
 regard them as a substantial groundwork for the edifice of art. 
 
 In man we find an uninterrupted rhythm from the simplest 
 to the most complex states of consciousness, passing from 
 mere sensation up to elaborated thought. No break can be 
 detected in this rhythm, although psychologists are wont to 
 denote its salient moments by distinctive names. They speak 
 of sensation, perception, emotion, will, reason, and so forth, as 
 though these were separate faculties. But the infinite subtlety 
 
 M 2
 
 164 CARICATURE, 
 
 of nature eludes such rude attempts at classification. Art 
 finds its proper sphere of operation only in the middle region 
 of the scale. The physical rudiments of consciousness are 
 not aesthetic, because they bring our carnal functions into play, 
 and only indirectly agitate the complex of our nature. The 
 more abstract modes of thought are not aesthetic, because they 
 have renounced the element of corporeity and sense ; and art 
 has to fulfil its function through sensuous presentation. Art 
 is therefore obliged to cast roots down into sense, and to 
 flower up into thought, remaining within the province where 
 these extremes of consciousness interpenetrate. This is what 
 Hegel meant when he called beauty die sinnliche Erscheinung 
 der Idee (the apparition, to sense and in sense, of the idea) a 
 definition which, in spite of its metaphysical form, is precisely 
 suited to express the fact. 
 
 Poetry, if I may apply these conclusions to the most purely 
 intellectual of the arts, makes an appeal to thought, emotion, 
 sense, together, in one blended harmony. If thought pre- 
 dominates too crudely, as in some cantos of Dante's ' Paradiso,' 
 in some books of Lucretius, in many passages of Milton's and 
 of Wordsworth's verse, then the external form of metre and 
 poetic diction does not save the product from being prosaic. 
 On the other hand, if a coarse appeal be made to sense 
 through sound, as in a large portion of Marino's 'Adone,' 
 we are cloyed by sweet vacuity. Or if, as in the case of 
 Baffo's Venetian lyrics, the contents be deliberately prurient, 
 awakening mere animal associations, then no form of sonnet, 
 madrigal, or ode saves this poetry from being prosaic. It 
 meets the same condemnation at the lower end of the scale as 
 we passed on parts of Dante, Lucretius, Milton, Wordsworth 
 at the higher end. Purely intellectual and purely sensual 
 poetry fail alike by contradicting the law of poetry's existence. 
 They are not poetry, but something else. 
 
 Neither unmixed thought nor unmixed sense is the proper 
 stuff of art. Still we must remember that art, occupying the 
 middle region between these extremes, has to bring the 
 manifold orchestra of consciousness into accord. Nowhere 
 is there an abrupt chasm in man's sentient being. Touch,
 
 THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 165 
 
 taste, smell, sex must be made to vibrate like the dull strings 
 of bass-viols, to thrill like woody tubes of hautboys, to pierce 
 like shrill yet mellow accents of the clarionet, to stir the 
 soul like the tumultuous voices of brass instruments. Sight 
 and hearing, through their keener intellectual significance, 
 dominate this harmony ; even as treble and tenor chords of 
 violin and viola control a symphony. The final object of the 
 whole concert is to delight and stimulate the mind, not to 
 exercise the brain by logical propositions, nor to excite the 
 appetite by indecent imagery. Precisely in this attunement 
 of all the senses to the service of impassioned thought lies the 
 secret of the noblest art.
 
 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 I 
 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 
 
 THE etymology of words which we are wont to use in a 
 figurative sense will often help us to form a right concep- 
 tion of the different shades of meaning attached to them by 
 custom. 
 
 Style is derived from the Latin stilus ; and stilus was the 
 metal-pointed instrument with which the Romans wrote 
 upon their waxen tablets. When Cicero employed the phrase, 
 orationes pane Attico stilo scripta, he meant to praise the 
 diction of certain speeches which were written ' almost with 
 an Attic pen,' or 'almost in an Attic style.' When he spoke 
 of stilus exercitatus, this was equal to ' the pen of a practised 
 writer,' or 'a practised style.' Stilo Plautino may be 
 indifferently translated ' with the pen of Plautus,' or ' in 
 the style of Plautus.' 
 
 Thus, during the golden period of Latin literature, the 
 word stilus had already passed into the stage of metaphor. 
 The mechanical instrument of writing was taken to indicate 
 the manner in which anything was written, in the same way 
 as we speak of the palette, the burin, or the pencil of artists 
 to indicate the manner of their execution. 
 
 Modern scholars, at the time when European culture was 
 still classical and Latin was the universal language, adopted
 
 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 167 
 
 this term naturally. But as no one now used a stilus in 
 writing, the metaphor implied in it was not so obvious. The 
 ancients, mindful of its etymology, had confined the word 
 style to modes of writing, with rare and post- Augustan exten- 
 sion to modes of speaking. We have come to apply it to all 
 the arts as well as to much besides. We speak of style in 
 architecture, sculpture, painting, music ; style in manners, 
 style in law procedure ; the style of royal or noble persons, 
 the old and new style of chronology, the style in which a 
 thing is done or carried out. We have even an adjective 
 from the slang dictionary stylish to indicate a smart 
 individual, carriage, horse, costume, and so forth. 
 
 This wide extension of the metaphor has induced a 
 further usage, which bears us far away from the original 
 instrument of writing. We talk of style in general, as a 
 quality which some compositions display, while others lack it. 
 We say of an author, not only that he is distinguished by an 
 Attic style or by a practised style, but also that ' he has 
 style.' What we mean is that his work exhibits certain 
 qualities of artistic distinction. And so we say of a picture : 
 ' Whatever its defects may be, everybody will confess that it 
 possesses style.' 
 
 Style, therefore, in its broadest signification, is now 
 synonymous with mode of expression or presentation. When 
 we praise a piece of prose for its style, we mean that thoughts 
 have been clearly, precisely, powerfully, beautifully expressed 
 in language. When we condemn a building for its style, we 
 mean that the architect has employed a faulty system of con- 
 struction, a vicious scheme of decoration, or an inharmonious 
 distribution of parts. 
 
 The standard of what is good or bad in style varies with 
 fashion and the age in which men live, with their conception 
 of the purposes and functions of the arts, and also with the 
 bias of successive schools of criticism. In the middle of the 
 last century, the Divine Comedy was reckoned barbarous, 
 and Gothic was a term of obloquy. At the beginning of this 
 century, Pope met with scanty justice : and refined sensibility 
 shrank with a shudder from the work of Wren.
 
 168 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 
 
 Yet all judgments in such matters, however divergent they 
 may be, imply the belief that there is a right and wrong in 
 the arts of expression. Criticism aims at ascertaining what 
 constitutes excellence of style apart from changes of fashion, 
 scholastic prejudices, and personal partialities. It seeks to 
 discern and to interpret the goodness or the badness of each 
 particular manifestation, according to the principles by which 
 the artist has been governed, and not by the application of 
 canons irrelevant to his age, race, and aims. 
 
 II 
 
 Style, in literature, may be roughly described as the 
 adequate investiture of thought with language. The best 
 style is that in which no other verbal form could be imagined 
 more appropriate for the utterance of thought than the one 
 which has been given by the writer. ' Proper words in proper 
 places make the true definition of a style,' said Swift. To 
 seize le mot propre is the aim of those French authors who 
 are our masters in literary expression regarded as a fine art. 
 Between the thing thought, and the thing uttered, there ought 
 to be no rift for the insertion of the finest edge of disjunctive 
 analysis. 
 
 But here we are met with a preliminary problem. Is thought 
 separable from language ? Can language be said to have an 
 existence apart from thought, or thought from language ? 
 
 Scientific students, at the present day, will hardly dispute 
 the priority of thought to language. The rudiments of 
 thought exist in animals who have no articulate speech. 
 In certain states of the human consciousness in dreams, for 
 instance, and in those moods of the mind when images are 
 brought suddenly into new and luminous relations mental 
 operations of the highest importance may be carried on with- 
 out the intervention of language. We awake to ourselves 
 and become aware of having reached conclusions, although 
 we cannot recall the syllogistic process, and have, perhaps, 
 some difficulty in finding words for what we know to be the 
 real result of cerebration.
 
 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 169 
 
 Language does not create thought. On the contrary, 
 thought demands language for its utterance. For this very 
 reason thought goes before language, and evokes it as an 
 instrument. But language once created, the words which 
 have been launched on their career, pregnant with antecedent 
 thoughts, react upon the minds of those who use them. As 
 the race exists now, the links of connection between language 
 and thought are so complicated, and of such immemorial 
 antiquity words are so shot and coloured with past emotions 
 and accepted meaning that, in literature, thought, the stuff 
 to be expressed, cannot be disentangled from its verbal 
 vehicle. Body is not more inseparable from soul than style 
 from thought, the language of expression from the mental 
 matter to be uttered. 
 
 It might appear as though every thought had its inevitable 
 symbol in language, and that style is therefore uncontrollable. 
 This, however, is not the case ; for though thought needs the 
 vehicle of words for utterance, it has so fashioned language 
 that many modes of expression for the same idea or emotion 
 are possible. That only one of these is the absolutely right 
 one, will be admitted by those who have seriously studied the 
 problem of style. Yet it is not given to all nay, it is granted 
 to a very few in each generation to find the unerring, the 
 inevitable phrase. The thinker has a wide range for choice 
 and selection. He can deal with words to some extent in the 
 same way as the painter deals with form and colour. In this 
 sense language has an independence of its own, and may be 
 considered external to the literary artist, just as marble is 
 external to the sculptor and musical sound to the composer 
 of a symphony. Later on, however, we shall see that the 
 artist in language does not stand in the same relation to his 
 vehicle as the artist in form, colour, tone. 
 
 Every thought, then, has its own fit and exact mould of 
 language ; and each variation of, expression causes some 
 modification of the thought to be expressed. The aim of 
 art in writing is therefore to find that form of words which 
 shall most aptly render the thought we seek to utter. 
 
 Attention to language and the niceties of style enables a
 
 170 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 
 
 man to acquire the faculty of bringing the subtlest, obscurest, 
 most complicated thoughts to light. What is called command 
 of language is indispensable to a writer ; and this, though 
 it implies natural endowment, may be largely improved by 
 study. 
 
 Attention to thought enables a man possessed with a fair 
 command of language to seize the words required for its 
 expression. Clear thinking is the first requisite of a good 
 style ; for if the thought be vague or feebly grasped, not all 
 the powers of rhetoric will hide its poverty. Better precise 
 and bald lucidity than nebulous magnificence of diction. 
 But when the thought is clear, art may legitimately be exer- 
 cised, not merely for the purpose of attaining veracity of 
 expression, but also for clothing it with beauty, and decking 
 it with ornament. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This intimate connection of thought with language is the 
 main reason why style differs in the hands of different writers. 
 As a man habitually thinks and feels, so will he express him- 
 self. No one can divest himself of inborn personality ; and 
 personality is bound to qualify diction. The colour-blind 
 cannot describe landscape in the same way as those who are 
 acutely sensitive to tints. The deaf to music move in a 
 region apart from that in which tone-lovers dwell. These are 
 coarse and obvious instances. Vocabulary, and not vocabulary 
 alone, but rhythm, cadence, structure of sentence, composition 
 of paragraph, rhetoric, are all conditioned by the artist's 
 individuality. 
 
 In like manner the languages of nations are formed by 
 hereditary modes of thought and feeling, by ethnological and 
 climatic conditions, by moral habits and religious ideals. 
 These influences, continued through successive generations, 
 mould the mother speech, and give it what we call its genius. 
 The genius of a language is the genius of the race which made 
 it. This becomes the common property of all the individuals 
 who use it, and communicates a common quality to their 
 style. Vary as men may do among themselves, they exhibit
 
 171 
 
 cognate ways of thinking, cognate ways of expressing what 
 they think, through being members of one race and using one 
 national language. An Italian cannot put into words exactly 
 the same shade of thought as a German, or an Englishman as 
 a Frenchman ; the genius of the mother tongue in each case 
 forbids identity of utterance. The truth of this has been 
 acutely felt by all who have attempted to translate the 
 poetry or the philosophy of another literature into their own 
 language. 
 
 Style has therefore a double aspect, personal and national. 
 The difficulty of translation, to which I have alluded, may 
 serve to illustrate what is meant by this. Perfect translation 
 from one language into another is impossible, because the 
 personal and national peculiarities of any single composition 
 cannot be reproduced in a version which obeys the genius of 
 a different language, and displays the idiosyncracy of another 
 writer. The style of the './Eneid,' for example, was deter- 
 mined by the nature of Latin as used by Virgil. The style of 
 Dryden's translation is still further qualified by the peculiarities 
 of English as Dryden used it. If the style of the original is a 
 double quantity (Latin + Virgil), the style of the translation 
 is a quadruple quantity (Latin + Virgil combined with 
 English + Dryden). This is putting the case roughly, and 
 with a crudity which is almost grotesque. Not merely have 
 two languages and two poets co-operated to produce the final 
 result of the translation, but we have also to take into account 
 the mental and moral changes in the world at large, which 
 prevented Dryden from entering into exact sympathy with 
 his original. 
 
 Thus, to sum up the main points of this section, we are 
 forced to regard style from two points of view : as something 
 which belongs to the individual through his mental and 
 moral qualities, and through his greater or less command of 
 language ; and also as something which the individual derives 
 from the tongue he uses, it being impossible to obtain precisely 
 the same effects in Greek and Latin, French and German. 
 The genius of the race and the genius of the man have both 
 to be considered.
 
 172 HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 
 
 IV 
 
 Hitherto we have been contemplating style subjectively, 
 from the inside. We have considered it as verbal expression, 
 indispensable to human beings in their utterance of thought 
 through language. But we must also approach the problem 
 objectively, from the outside. This we are enabled to do by 
 the admitted fact that style can be controlled, and language 
 artistically handled. ' The style of an author should be the 
 image of his mind,' said Gibbon. That is the subjective 
 aspect. ' But,' he continues, ' the choice and command 
 of language is the fruit of exercise.' That is the objective 
 aspect. 
 
 It will be admitted that when we speak of style in 
 literature, we are often thinking of an art whereby men more 
 or less deliberately clothe their thought in language, and of an 
 art which can to some extent be acquired. Words, as I have 
 said above, are for the poet and prose-writer what lines and 
 colours are for the painter, or form and marble for the sculptor. 
 Thought is, however, so inextricably interwoven with language, 
 and words react so subtly upon mental operations, that 
 language cannot be regarded as a vehicle in the same way as 
 the marble of the sculptor, the pigments of the painter, are 
 plastic vehicles. It is possible, indeed, to treat language 
 aesthetically : that is to say, with special reference to its 
 sonorous, rhythmical, suggestive, and symbolical qualities. 
 Still the fact remains that thought demands language in the 
 simplest no less than in the subtlest modes of utterance, 
 whereby men may communicate with their neighbours ; and 
 so words come to the verbal artist surcharged with multi- 
 tudinous associations. Thought does not demand colour, 
 marble, tone in the ordinary intercourse of life. It uses these 
 things at its pleasure and caprice, not for its necessities. The 
 problem of style in literature is therefore ab initio different 
 from that of style in any of the other arts. The writer has to 
 obtain his effects by manipulating a material already pregnant 
 with intellectual and emotional meanings. Nowhere is the 
 connection between content and expression, mental subject-
 
 HISTOKY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 173 
 
 matter and artistic embodiment, more intimate, more vitally 
 dependent upon the kindred essence of the two terms. 
 Neither form in carven stone and painted superficies, nor 
 sound in music, has the same mysterious relation to the 
 human consciousness, the same approximation to identity 
 with thought and feeling, the same diurnal and familiar 
 reciprocity with mental processes, as words have. Thought 
 is expressed, we say, in a statue or a picture or a symphony ; 
 but a poem is articulate thought. 
 
 Continuing analysis upon this second line, we are met with 
 many uses of the word style, all of which indicate the belief 
 that it is an instrument to be employed at will, and an art to 
 be acquired by cultivation. Thus style is spoken of as the 
 power to express thought with polish, lucidity, correctness, 
 vigour, beauty. We distinguish the style proper to poetry, 
 rhetoric, argument ; to tragedy and comedy ; to history and 
 fiction ; to the eloquence of the pulpit, the senate and the 
 forum ; to scientific exposition and metaphysical speculation. 
 We talk of the grand style and the pedestrian style, the 
 epistolary style and the anecdotical style, the style of con- 
 versation and the style of description. In all the applications 
 of the term it is implied that a man of taste and ability will 
 modify his use of language to meet the special requirements 
 of the task proposed. He will have learned by study to 
 distinguish between different tones and values in the instru- 
 ment of speech, and will have acquired by exercise the power 
 of touching that mighty organ of expression to various issues. 
 In this way, style comes to be regarded as a branch of rhetoric, 
 capable of being reduced to rules, and within certain limits 
 capable of being taught.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 
 
 LANGUAGE in a nation is an index to the mental and 
 emotional character of the nation, to its hereditary ante- 
 cedents and historical experience. 
 
 ' What made the Jew a Jew, the Greek a Greek, is as 
 unexplained as what daily causes the germs of an oak and of 
 an ash to produce different trees. All we know is that, in 
 the vague and infinitely distant past, races were nourished 
 into form and individuality by the varied operation of those 
 unreckoned sympathies which attach man to nature, his 
 primitive mother. But the laws of that rudimentary growth 
 are still unknown ; " the abysmal depths of personality " in 
 nations, as in men, remain unsounded ; we cannot even experi- 
 mentalise upon the process of ethnical development. Those 
 mighty works of art which we call languages, in the con- 
 struction of which whole peoples unconsciously co-operated, 
 the forms of which were determined not by individual genius, 
 but by the instincts of successive generations, acting to one 
 end inherent in the nature of the race those poems of pure 
 thought and fancy, cadenced not in words, but in living 
 imagery, fountain-heads of inspiration, mirrors of the mind of 
 nascent nations, which we call mythologies these surely are 
 more marvellous in their infantine spontaneity than any more 
 mature production of the races which evolved them.' 
 
 These sentences I wrote many years ago ; and I resume 
 them here, because they utter our abiding sense of the miracle
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 175 
 
 of national character expressed in language and in myth. 
 Still, though the science of origins throws as yet no light 
 upon the birth of languages and the process whereby they 
 became the symbols of each educated nation's genius, it is 
 not impossible to trace the biography of a people in the 
 development of its mother tongue, and the assimilation 
 through speech of mental qualities derived from other races. 
 
 ' Language,' says Walt Whitman, ' is not an abstract 
 construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is 
 something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, 
 tastes of long generations of humanity, and has its bases 
 broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are 
 made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most 
 to do with actual land and sea.' 
 
 That is true in the essential, in the cradle-age of races. 
 But language early passes into a metaphorical stage, when 
 words expressive of the concrete and material are applied 
 to abstract and intellectual concepts when the diaphragm 
 becomes the mind, and the breath of man's nostrils becomes 
 the soul, and to grasp a thing with the hand signifies to 
 comprehend with the intelligence. Later on, as thought is 
 forced deliberately to forge equivalents in speech for abstract 
 ideas, the influence of individual thinkers begins to tell. 
 Aristotle imposes the nomenclature of logic upon his nation, 
 and through Greek literature upon posterity until the present 
 day. Eaces intermingle, and assimilate religions, philosophies, 
 systems of jurisprudence. At this point, by borrowing terms 
 which do not suit their native genius, or by clumsy attempts 
 at translation, they run the risk of absorbing elements imper- 
 fectly adapted to the ideas they are intended to express. 
 A new mythology of abstractions comes into being. The 
 viroffratng of Greek metaphysic (originally groundwork or 
 substratum, then real existence or substance) takes shape in 
 the Latin Athanasian creed as persona (originally a mask and 
 then a personage), and is repeated in our churches with mis- 
 taken connotation by the vulgar in the form of person. 
 
 During this process of growth, the style of the race mani- 
 fests itself both by what it assimilates and by what it rejects,
 
 176 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 by its encouragement of tendencies inherent in the language 
 and its dismissal of inconvenient factors, by its adoption of 
 foreign phrases useful to some special purpose or of meta- 
 phors and slang which suit new niceties of meaning, by the 
 awkward adaptation of alien and inharmonious terms neces- 
 sitated in the traffic of daily life, and finally by the exact and 
 beautiful unfolding of those qualities in which its own strength 
 lies. That language ultimately exhibits the highest capacity 
 for style which combines conservative respect for its native 
 genius with plasticity, becoming by each phase of growth a 
 more perfect instrument of unimpeded utterance, more recep- 
 tive of ideas, and more assimilative without loss of character. 
 Thus the intellectual and emotional qualities of nations 
 determine their style ; and their history (contact with other 
 races, submission to altered conditions of society, changes 
 in religion, epochs of culture) is written in their literature. 
 When the nation is a complicated hybrid, as is the case with 
 us English folk, its style presents a complex problem not only 
 to the philologer and etymologist, but also to the student 
 of psychology. A chapter from ' Modern Painters ' would 
 furnish the analyst with ample material for a lecture on 
 comparative ethnology and the historical evolution of the 
 English people. 
 
 II 
 
 Of all languages Greek has the widest range and compass 
 as an organ of expression. Not weight and gravity, but 
 lightness, elasticity, volubility, are its leading characteristics. 
 Strength is so clothed with radiance and beauty (as in the 
 godhood of the Delphian Apollo) that we think less of the 
 power than of the grace of this divine tongue. Homer's 
 phrase for human speech, <?7rea Trrepoevra, 'winged words,' is 
 peculiarly true of Greek, with its variety of liquids, vowels, 
 diphthongs, its gliding flow and twitter as of swallows on 
 their flight, its garrulous profusion of reiterated particles. 
 The blending of long and sonorous, yet never heavy, words 
 with short and lightly feathered monosyllables the perfect 
 balance and even distribution of consonants and vowels the
 
 NATIONAL STYLE ill 
 
 richly developed accidence and syntax of the language its 
 three genders the singular, dual, and plural numbers of its 
 declined nouns the complicated conjugation of its verbs, and 
 the copiousness of their forms all these qualities of a still 
 youthful and prolific organ of speech endow Greek eloquence 
 with unique pliability, rendering it no less fit for the sim- 
 plicity of Simonidean epigraphy than for the rolling thunders 
 of Demosthenic oratory. 
 
 We do not know how the Greek poets declaimed their 
 verses. Having no clue to the antique pronunciation of the 
 language and no correct sense of its accentual values, we 
 feel their music with the eye rather than the ear, and lay an 
 exaggerated stress on quantity. Yet such is the indestructi- 
 bility of form and rhythm in verbal harmonies fashioned 
 for the utterance of noble thoughts, that even while labour- 
 ing under these disadvantages, we are able to appreciate the 
 grand manner of Greek style. 
 
 Si rvfjiftos, 3} vv/jL<pe'tov, 3> KasraaKaffis 
 ofaTjtm aelippovpos, ail iropevofnai 
 irpbj TOUS efjLavTrjs &v apidfjibv ev veitpois 
 itKe'iarov SeSenrai 4>epir6<|>aircra b\ia\6'r<av' 
 $>v \oiaOia 'ybi Kal /cctKj<TTO Sr] /j.a.Kptp 
 wpiv /JLOI ftoipav e^Keiv &iov. 
 
 In reading this passage we need not summon imagination 
 to our aid, nor bring before our mental eye the scene of 
 Antigone advancing to her bridal bed in Hades. It is enough 
 to feel the music of those opening lines, deep- toned and 
 mellow as the chords of viols. Then take the declamatory 
 swiftness of a wrathful adjuration : 
 
 TL Sfjra 5<$|rjs, % rl K\i)86t>os /caAiJs 
 jiiaTT/c /5eou<rijs ax^eA^/ua ylyvfrat, 
 fl T&S y' 'A.Q-f)t>as ipcurl df 
 
 ffd>eiv o'las re ical fiovas dp/ceic 
 K&/j.oiyf irov raCr' ^afrlv, oirives 
 IK Twi/Se /JL 1 e^dpavres elr' 
 ovofna. povov SeuracTes ; ov ykp 5ij r6 ye 
 ffiafjC ovSe r&pya. rUp?' tirel TO. 7' epya fJiov 
 ' ecrrl /xaAAor
 
 178 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 el? ffoi TO uriTpbs Kal irajrpbs 
 uiv oSv K' eK<o/3eI ^e. TOUT 
 I(ot5a. 
 
 Had we known nothing of GEdipus and his impendent doom, 
 the rhetoric of this keen indignant invective would be felt 
 in its fierce volubility and broken pauses the alternation of 
 verses wrought in monosyllables with verses of long billowy 
 words the compressed force of crasis and elision rapidly 
 exchanged for the same verbal elements deployed with full 
 syllabic emphasis. 
 
 I have observed that ponderosity is not the note of Greek 
 eloquence. Yet two great poets, early in this literature, 
 revealed the possibilities of a massive Greek style. These 
 were Pindar and .ZEschylus. Pindar builds with blocks of 
 words in the manner of Cyclopean masonry. 
 
 TOS 8e eof eVou aKTtVos irpoffdirov fj.apnaptoi<ras SpaKfis 
 t*s fify irSQcp KVfjLaiveTai, 3 aSdfj.avros 
 ?) mSdpov KExaAKei/rai fj.f \aivav KapSiav 
 
 Carrying on this figure of architectural structure, we might 
 point out that Pindar uses hardly any mortar ; dispenses with 
 the connecting particles, prepositions, expletives, in which 
 Greek style is usually redundant; works by collocation of 
 huge wedge-like phrases. 
 
 The massiveness of /Eschylus assumes a different form. 
 Aristophanes described that manner in a passage of the 
 ' Frogs,' which shows that Attic taste regarded it already as 
 archaic : 
 
 lerrot 8' iiriro\6<f> oiv re \6yui> Kopv6alo\a velicy, 
 
 Tf irapa6via, cr/j.i\fv/j.ard r' Zpytav, 
 a/jLvvofifvav (ppfvoTfurovos avdpbs 
 iirirof3dfjiot>a. 
 
 <t>pias 8' O.VTOKO/J.OV \u(pius \affiav\fva, \at-rav, 
 fifivbv firuncvviotf i-vvdywv $pv)yap.fvos ^fffi 
 ofjupoira.^, inva.Kii'6l>v imoavSiv 
 
 This pomp, as of heavy cavalry charging with plumes in air 
 and plunging horses, this effort, as of a Titan tearing bolted
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 179 
 
 planks asunder and snorting in his labour, mark the 
 .^Eschylean style, when the poet gives a free rein to the 
 impulse of his ' mighty line ' : 
 
 35- 
 
 S/xooal ywaiKes, a'ISe Topy&vtav Si'/ojy 
 
 Of such sort are the ponderous iambics, struggling beneath 
 their Marathonian panoply : 
 
 oAA' ov Kapaviffrrjpes o<p6a\fji(i>pvxoi. 
 
 .ZEschylus proves that Greek could be voluminous as well as 
 voluble. But in his hands the style was not always pushed 
 to the extreme of emphasis and exaggeration. Tragic 
 solemnity of diction reaches the height of massive yet 
 elastic energy in Cassandra's prophetic speeches delivered at 
 the gate of Agamemnon's palace. These are the sublimest 
 examples of dramatic poetry bequeathed to us by antiquity. 
 They are certainly unique in Greek literature for verbal 
 weight combined with fiery movement. 
 
 The Athenians refused to follow the leading of either Pindar 
 or /Eschylus. The ironical, analytical, dialectical instinct of 
 the people drew them aside to other issues. Just as sculpture, 
 after emerging from archaic clumsiness, passed rapidly through 
 the heroic beauty of Pheidias to the elegance and grace of 
 Praxiteles just as architecture refined upon the Doric column 
 in the Parthenon, and introduced the slender Ionic type so 
 literary style grew lighter and more delicate as years advanced. 
 The gravity of Sophocles has less of volume than the gravity 
 of his great predecessor. These lines from the ' Antigone ' 
 reveal the tragic manner at its purest, in its most character- 
 istically Attic form : 
 
 ov ydp ri /J.QI Zei/s %v 6 Kt]pvas rdde 
 ovS' i] VI>OIKOS ruv KO.TOJ Ofuv Aini) 
 ovSf ffOevew roffovrov WOJJ.TJV rck ffci 
 
 i'(i/i/ua SvvaffOai Qvr\rbv ovO' vire 
 
 ov ydp TI vvv ye xdx^es, &M." dei TTOTC 
 
 fj; ToGra, KovSels olSev ^{ '6rov '(^arrj. 
 
 N2
 
 180 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 It is upon passages like these that Euripides seems to have 
 formed his style ; that limpid and lucid flow of words, which 
 is so sweet and musical, so plastic and so melancholy : 
 
 ris 8' oI8ei/, ei rjv rov6\ t> KtK\r)Tai Oaveiv, 
 rb Gyv 8e 6vr)ffKfit> eari trK^v '6fj.a>s PpoTuv 
 voffovffiv ol jSAeTiwres, ol 8' o\w\6rfs 
 otiSey voaovffiv, ouSe KfKTijvrai. KO.KO.. 
 
 The Greeks, especially the Attic Greeks, were a nation of 
 talkers and public speakers. In the Lesche, the Agora, the 
 Palasstra, the Pnyx, the Dikasterion, they carried on their 
 intellectual life. Afterwards, they met again for discussion 
 and colloquy at banquets and wine-parties. These habits 
 affected their prose style, which was apt to be declamatory 
 and conversational rarely meditative. It is never impressive 
 by profound suggestions. It lacks mystery the mystery of 
 brooding and indwelling thought. We cannot mention a 
 Greek of the good period, who wrote as though he were 
 writing for himself and truth, without relation to an audience. 
 The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides were planned for 
 recitation. The philosophical works of the Socratic school 
 assumed the form of dialogue. Prose, under these condi- 
 tions, failed to attain the perfection which might have been 
 expected from the language and the genius of the race. It 
 displayed weaknesses inherent in the flexibility of the Greek 
 speech, and in the sociability of those who used it. Fluid, 
 glittering, versatile, attractive anything but sternly earnest, 
 heart-felt, monumental Attic prose forecasts the advent of 
 the GrcBCulus esuriens. Even the golden periods of Plato 
 suffer from loquacity, a twittering reiteration of yap and yovv 
 and fjifv and 8e, a conversational expansiveness, a superfluous 
 use of expletives, a disproportion between the thing said and 
 the way of saying it. Much may be conceded to Plato's 
 dramatic aim, and no man of taste would wish for alteration 
 in the diction of such masterpieces as the 'Kepublic,' the 
 ' Symposium,' and the ' Phasdrus.' As specimens of a pecu- 
 liar kind of literary art, they are unassailable, preserving 
 with peculiar felicity the very form and pressure of the times
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 181 
 
 they represent. Still, they reveal an element of weakness in 
 the juvenile Greek language its talkative facility, its want 
 of massy weight and pregnant suggestiveness. This defect 
 through them becomes the more apparent, because they are 
 the supreme examples of the quality in style to which Greek 
 prose aspired. 
 
 Aristotle was far less gifted as a stylist than his master. 
 In his hands Greek prose lost its charm of adolescent beauty. 
 At the same time it ceased to be garrulous. By his method 
 of scientific analysis and by his coinage of technical terms, 
 Aristotle exercised more influence over the language of 
 philosophy than Plato did ; and, when he passed away, the 
 genius of the race had already lost its fresh, creative faculty. 
 The Greeks continued for centuries to display inexhaustible 
 fertility in the manipulation of their plastic speech to suit the 
 subtlest shades of thought. This power gave them an empire 
 over the creeds, the logic, the diurnal diction of Christendom. 
 But they could not produce a prose style worthy of Hellas. 
 I will not except the orators from this criticism. Wonderful 
 as are the burning floods of eloquence in Demosthenes, the 
 long-wrought periods conducted to a fiery close, the march of 
 his phalanxed arguments, the pungent sting of his sarcasm, 
 and the sublimity of his appeals to human or to patriotic 
 feeling, Demosthenes did not found a solid prose style. The 
 study of rhetoric, when it left the bema for the academy, 
 encouraged the worst vices of Attic literature. It diverted 
 attention from matter to manner, and ended in the wire-drawn 
 conceits of the later sophists. 
 
 When we reflect upon Greek style, we return to Homer's 
 phrase : rea irrepoevra. The words of the language were too 
 winged too swift, perchance, for poetry of the severest order 
 too light and feathered for the purposes of monumental 
 prose. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The passage from Greek to Latin is like passing from a 
 paradise of flowers and fruit trees to a region of tilth and 
 pasture, from the boyhood of demigods to the adult manhood
 
 182 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 of heroic mortals. Language has advanced further from its 
 primitive exuberance. Latin has no dual, no aorist, no middle 
 voice, no verbs in /. It is deficient in the otiose particles 
 which made the Greek speech garrulous, retaining only such 
 conjunctions and prepositions as are strictly needful for the 
 logical coherence of sentences. It has dropped the definite 
 article, which contributes so much to the lightness of Greek. 
 No language of the same family is more parsimonious than 
 Latin in the means employed for utterance. None relies for 
 its rhetorical and logical effect more boldly upon the declen- 
 sion of nouns and participles, the inflection of verbs, and the 
 collocation of vocables. Greek superfluities have disappeared ; 
 the auxiliaries of modern languages have only partially begun 
 to sprout. Economy is exhibited in every element of this 
 athletic tongue. Like a naked gladiator, all bone and muscle, 
 it relies upon bare sinewy strength. Having preserved 
 genders, Latin is able to dispense with the indefinite article, 
 trusting to the cadence of nouns, adjectives, and participles 
 for the structure of its propositions. Since pronouns are not 
 demanded as subjects of the Latin verb, the appearance of 
 them becomes rhetorically emphatic : 
 
 Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit. . . . 
 Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. 
 
 As a consequence of these peculiarities, Latin is the monu- 
 mental language, the language of lapidary inscription, of 
 proverb and of epigram, of terse sentences and legal edicts. 
 It is also the oratorical language, abounding in sonorous 
 words of ositas and atio, and long reverberating verbs in the 
 subjunctive mood. The consonants are more closely packed 
 and carry greater weight than in the Greek ; still the vowel 
 sounds are deep, open, and plentifully distributed. It would 
 be difficult to match the following line for opulence in any 
 other literature : 
 
 Spargens humida mella soporiferumque papaver. 
 
 The Greek, as we have learned from Pindar, could do much 
 by massive building, by the juxtaposition of words in
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 183 
 
 blocks ; but Latin could do more. There ia a pregnancy of 
 rhetoric in the antithesis of verb and noun which only Latin 
 properly developed. Without loss of dignity, sentences can 
 be constructed in this language which carry the packed 
 meaning of logogriphs : 
 
 Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. 
 
 Latin is not voluble, and rarely rapid ; yet a master can make 
 it run in liquid numbers, with a slumberous or a melancholy 
 flow, as of some soft-sliding stream : 
 
 Inter arundineasque comas gravidumque papaver, 
 Et tacitos sine labe lacus sine murmure rivos. 
 
 The use of que, and the force gained by the omission of the 
 
 pronoun, are beautifully illustrated by the following example : 
 
 Tempora labuntur tacitisque senescimus annis. 
 
 In English the pathos of the line would have to be impaired 
 by the weakness of a separate and, and the necessary intro- 
 duction of the short word we. The most felicitous renderings 
 of memorable Latin lines into English reveal the superiority 
 of the classical language in qualities of monumental repose. 
 Virgil wrote : 
 
 Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aavum. 
 
 The Boman obtained his effect of lapsing waters by simple 
 quantities of sound. Dryden translates the verse and it is 
 one of his triumphs of metaphrase thus : 
 
 He flows, and, as he flows, for ever will flow on. 
 
 The Briton substitutes for pure sound-quantity the hurry of 
 monosyllables, and appeals to the intellectual imagination 
 rather than the verbal sense. Some rhetorical strokes in 
 Latin can be reproduced in no other language. Try as we 
 may, we shall not render the force of such a line as this : 
 Intolerabilius nihil est quam femina dives 
 
 where the passion of the speaker is symbolised in the first 
 emphatic long word, and the sting of his satire is conveyed 
 by the clinching spondee at its close.
 
 184 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 In the noble blending of long words with short, the rejec- 
 tion of superfluities, and the dependence upon verbal collo- 
 cation for the expression of logical meaning, Latin is 
 unrivalled among languages. Whatever Greek could do 
 (and Greek did many things beyond the scope of Latin), 
 no Greek poet, exqept Sappho, produced stanzas of the same 
 stationary and yet moving dignity as these : 
 
 Atqui sciebat quee sibi barbarus 
 Tortor pararet : non aliter tamen 
 Dimovit obstantes propinquoa 
 
 Et populum reditus morantem, 
 Quam si clientum longa negotia, 
 Dijudicata lite, relinqueret, 
 
 Tendens Venafranos in agros 
 Aut Lacedffimonium Tarentum. 
 
 The foregoing paragraphs betray no slender admiration 
 for the Latin language as an organ of style. If I may intro- 
 duce a personal confession, it is to this effect : that in pro- 
 portion as I have grown in years and in reflection on the art 
 of writing passing away from youth, and soberly testing 
 enthusiasms awakened by first contact with the divine Greek 
 imagination I have grown to appreciate with deeper 
 reverence the austere and masculine virtues of Latin, the 
 sincerity and brevity of Roman speech, the nervous grip with 
 which that language grasps thought, and the pomp of more 
 than Oriental draperies with which its eloquence envelops it, 
 when the haughty genius of the race condescends to ornament 
 and methods of rhetorical persuasion. 
 
 It is not, in the case of Latin, that sweetness distils from 
 strength, like honey from the famous jaws of Samson's lion. 
 There is little enough of pure sweetness in that literature. 
 What sugared drops we find are scarcely native to the soil, 
 but stolen from the hives of subtle Hellas. I would rather 
 say that in the clanging periods of Roman eloquence, in the 
 solemn march of Livy's historical narration, in the stabbing 
 epigrams of Tacitus, in the swollen torrent-cry of Juvenal's 
 invective, in the oceanic ebb and flow of Lucretian hexa- 
 meters, the stubborn nudity of Latin clothes itself with gor-
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 185 
 
 geous paludaments, which it wears like a conqueror, and trails 
 in the dust of the imperial city like a general on his path to 
 Capitolian Jove, That investiture of naked strength with 
 studied oratorical magnificence is the supreme achievement 
 of the Roman genius in style. And the indifference with 
 which the trappings of purple and of gold are carried, the 
 brutality of the underlying thought, the solid concrete of the 
 road on which the triumphal chariots travel, add to the 
 impressiveness of this majestic Roman manner. 
 
 The ruins of the Parthenon are unapproachable in loveli- 
 ness, crowning the sacred hill on which a virgin goddess in 
 the world's young prime descended. They enchant us with 
 a revelation of divine harmony and immortal beauty. The 
 ruins of the Pont du Gard, bridging the broad valley of 
 the Gardon, uplifted high in air, with no charm of form, no 
 appeal to the aesthetic sense, conceding nothing to nature 
 and claiming nothing from environment ; these Roman ruins 
 enthrall the imagination with a different but not less potent 
 magic. 
 
 We cannot surmise what Latin literature might have pro- 
 duced if it had not submitted to Greek models. The religion 
 of the Romans shows them to have been deficient in the 
 first constituent of national poetry, an imaginative mythology. 
 We are, therefore, so far justified in believing that the 
 assimilative instinct of their artists was a right one. Yet 
 how firmly did the Roman spirit grasp whatever things it 
 touched ! 
 
 Excudent alii spirantia mollius sera, 
 Credo equidem vivos ducent de marmore vultus ; 
 Orabunt causas melius, ccelique meatus 
 Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent : 
 Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ; 
 Has tibi erunt artes : pacisque imponere morem, 
 Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. 
 
 The poet who in proud humility and candid sense of fact 
 uttered these words of condescending withdrawal from the 
 lesser fields of empire, exercised a lordlier influence Over the 
 last nineteen centuries of civilisation than any poet of the
 
 186 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 Greeks did ; and the language used by Virgil passed into the 
 mother speech of modern nations, and controlled their style 
 in its formation. 
 
 Latin had the defects of its qualities, and these were very 
 different from those of Greek literature in the decadence. 
 It remained rigid, unpliable, stubbornly representative of a 
 warlike and administrative race, in spite of the polish added 
 by its Hellenistic artists. The chief difficulty with which this 
 language had to contend was its intellectual inflexibility, its 
 impermeability, its resistance to ideas. The Greek vocabu- 
 lary proved itself adequate to every step in speculative 
 thought. It clothed the figments of metaphysic, as it had 
 clothed the fancies of mythology, with specious forms, all 
 plastic and all beautiful. We have therefore perhaps to be 
 thankful that the books of the New Testament and the 
 theology of the first Christian centuries were entrusted to 
 the waning genius of Hellas. Catholic dogma might have 
 been more jejune and sterile than it is, had it been first 
 handled by Romans instead of Hellenists. As it was, the 
 ruthlessness of Latin exposed the plausibility of Greek, when- 
 ever the two languages were brought into close contact. But 
 Christianity became the Empire's creed. The Roman genius, 
 born to rule and bent on ruling, adopted and gave world- 
 currency to metaphysical ideas which were but inadequately 
 represented in the Latin speech. 
 
 IV 
 
 What the Latin Church had undertaken, and what the 
 Latin tongue was destined to perform during the years which 
 preceded and the centuries which followed the dissolution of 
 the Empire, can only be understood by tracing the develop- 
 ment of the language under these altered conditions. 
 
 The date 895 A.D. marks one of the most important epochs 
 in world-history. In this year the Emperor Theodosius died, 
 and the Roman realm was finally divided into Eastern and 
 Western. After the lapse of less than a century, the share 
 which fell to his second son Honorius, Caesar of the West,
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 187 
 
 devolved upon barbarian chiefs, never again to be reunited 
 with the patrimony of his elder son Arcadius. In the year 
 395, the three builders-up of Latin Christianity, Ambrose, 
 Jerome, Augustine, were still alive. Augustine, the youngest, 
 had recently been consecrated Bishop of Hippo. Jerome was 
 finishing his translation of the Bible in a monastery at 
 Bethlehem. Ambrose, the great Archbishop of Milan, who, 
 five years earlier, repulsed Theodosius from the doors of his 
 cathedral, reminding the lord of the terraqueous globe that 
 Christ was above Cassar, had two more years to live. These 
 three men are justly reverenced as fathers and founders of 
 Latin Christendom. Their work was destined to endure for 
 better or for worse, deepening and defining that intellectual 
 separation of West from East, of Eoman from Byzantine 
 ways of thought, which showed itself politically in the par- 
 tition of the Empire between the two heirs of Theodosius. 
 
 Thus no period of time was more pregnant for the future 
 of the Occidental races than the close of the fourth century 
 after Christ. The waning lights of paganism mingle with 
 the waxing lights of Christendom. Classical civility comes 
 to an end ; the stuff of the modern world is prepared by the 
 intrusion of barbaric tribes and northern hordes into the 
 comity of nations. Claudian, the last pagan poet of the 
 classical type, celebrates the apotheosis of Christian Theo- 
 dosius in voluble hexameters. Ambrose, at the same 
 moment, invents hymns for the Church at Milan in rhythms 
 which already demand rhyme, and need only the addition 
 of rhyme to be mediaeval. 'Quantum flevi in hymnis et 
 canticis eeclesise tuae ! ' writes Augustine of these sacred 
 songs, with a touch of emotion which is wholly modern. 
 Jerome, adapting the Latin tongue to Oriental thought and 
 imagery, creates a new instrument of verbal utterance in the 
 prose of the Vulgate. 
 
 The Vulgate is undoubtedly the chief monument of the 
 mental transformation I am tracing. This resurrection of a 
 new organ of style for we can hardly call it less from 
 the grave where Cicero and Tacitus and Livy lay embalmed, 
 is one of the most singular phenomena in history. Too
 
 188 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 little attention has hitherto been paid to the extraordinary 
 plasticity of Latin in the decline of antique civilisation. 
 Responding to altered spiritual conditions, Jerome clad the 
 Roman strength of speech with Asiatic pomp, bent its im- 
 perial stiffness to Greek subtlety, drew from its iron chords 
 the melodies of Syrian lyres and harping hallelujahs of 
 apocalyptic ecstasy. At the moment when classical style 
 was expiring in the conceits and reminiscences of poets like 
 Ausonius, a fresh and varied style appeared, adapted in its 
 elasticity and plangent music to the utterance of modern 
 emotion. And while the instrument of prose was being 
 reconstructed thus, metre discarded quantity for accent, 
 invented new rhythms and new stanzas, adopted the orna- 
 ment of rhyme. 
 
 The Vulgate is so all-important in this change of national 
 style, which prepared the Latin language to be the cosmo- 
 politan vehicle of expression in Europe during the next 
 900 years, that I may be pardoned for exhibiting its 
 prose by illustrations. With any passage of Cicero, or 
 Livy, or Quintilian, in our minds, let us read the following 
 extracts : 
 
 Post hsec aperuit Job os suum, et maledixit diei suo, et locutus est. 
 
 Pereat dies in qua natus sum, et nox in qua dictum est : conceptus 
 est homo. 
 
 Dies ille vertatur in tenebras, non requirat eum Deus desuper, et non 
 illustretur lumine. 
 
 Obscurent eum tenebrae et umbra mortis, occupet eum caligo, et 
 involvatur amaritudine. 
 
 Noctem illam tenebrosus turbo possideat, non computetur in diebus 
 anni, nee numeretur in mensibus. 
 
 Sit nox ilia solitaria, nee laude digna : 
 
 maledicant ei qui maledicunt diei, qui parati sunt suscitare leviathan : 
 
 Obtenebrentur stellae caligine ejus : expectet lucem et non videat, nee 
 ortum surgentis auroras : 
 
 Quia non conclusit ostia ventris qui portavit me, non abstulit mala 
 ab oculis meis. 
 
 Quare non in vulva mortnus sum, egressus ex utero non statim 
 peril? 
 
 Quare exceptus genibus ? Cur lactatus uberibus ? 
 
 Nunc enim dormiens silerem, et somno meo requiescerem :
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 189 
 
 Cum regibus et consulibus terrse, qui tedificant sibi solitudines : 
 
 Aut cum principibus, qui possident aurum et replent domes suas 
 argento : 
 
 Aut sicut abortivum absconditum non subsisterem, vel qui concept! 
 non viderunt lucem. 
 
 Ibi impii cessaverunt a tumultu, et ibi requiescunt fessi robore. 
 
 Like the chords of penitential psalms, chanted by male 
 voices in the gloom of cathedral choirs, the deep reverberations 
 of these weighty Latin words go rolling through the cavernous 
 aisles of the mysterious mediaeval period. 
 
 Veni de Libano sponsa mea, veni de Libano, veni : Coronaberis de 
 capite Amana, de vertice Sanir et Hermon, de cubilibus leonum, de 
 montibus pardorum. 
 
 Vulnerasti cor meum soror mea sponsa, vulnerasti cor meum in uno 
 oculorum tuorum et in uno crine colli tui. 
 
 Quam pulchrae sunt mammse tuas soror mea sponsa ! pulchriora sunt 
 ubera tua vino, et odor unguentorum tuorum super omnia aromata. 
 
 Favus distillans labia tua sponsa, mel et lac sub lingua tua : et odor 
 vestimentorum tuorum sicut odor thuris. 
 
 Hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. 
 
 Emissiones tuse paradisus malorum punicorum cum pomorum 
 fructibus, Cypri cum nardo ; 
 
 Nardus et crocus, fistula et cinnamonum cum universis lignis Libani, 
 myrrha et aloe cum omnibus primis unguentis. 
 
 Fons hortorum : puteus aquarum viventium, quse fluunt impetu de 
 Libano. 
 
 Surge aquilo, et veni auster, perfla horturn meum, et fluant 
 aromatata illius. 
 
 Like the breaking of an alabaster box of precious ointment, 
 like the tossing up of heavy -perfumed censers ; so the 
 penetrating odours of this prose, artless in style, oppressive 
 in passionate suggestion, float abroad through all the convents 
 and the churches of the centuries to come, laden with languors 
 of mystic love, pregnant with poetry undreamed of on the 
 banks of the Tiber or Ilissus. The Latin of the Canticles 
 aspires toward music, and will exhale in sound when 
 Palestrina wakes the master art of modern times. 
 
 Una enim catena tenebrarum omnes erant colligati. Sive spiritus 
 sibilans, aut inter spissos arborum ramos avium Sonus suuvis, aut vis 
 aqua; decurrentis nimium,
 
 190 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 Aut sonus validus praecipitatarum petrarum, ant ludentium animalium 
 cursus invisus, aut mugientium valida bestiarum vox, aut resonans de 
 altissimis montibus echo : deficientes facie bant illos prse timore. 
 
 Omnis enim orbis terrarum limpido illuminabatur lumine, et non 
 impeditus operibus continebatur. 
 
 Soils autem illis superposita erat gravis nox, imago tenebrarum, quse 
 superventura illis erat. Ipsi ergo sibi erant graviores tenebris. 
 
 Like the darkness of the Dark Ages the darkness which 
 deepened until the pulse of human life well-nigh stopped, 
 and men sat still with indrawn breath, waiting for the mid- 
 night bell to toll the advent of the year of doom these 
 groaning Latin sentences diffuse a sinister obscurity, and 
 symbolise the gloom in which the nations walked, while 
 ' the whole world shined with clear light, and none were 
 hindered in their labour,' but the minds of men wore 
 night around them, and terrified their souls with self-created 
 shadows. 
 
 What strikes us most in this new style is the dissolution 
 of the previous periodic structure of sentences, and the 
 addition of a hitherto unapprehended colour-value to the 
 rich sonority of ample Latin verbs and nouns. Writers of 
 hymns in rhyme presently availed themselves of these 
 peculiarities. The noble blending of long and short words, 
 which we noticed in a quotation from Horace, now came to be 
 employed with different purpose. It gave singular majesty 
 to the religious emotion of stanzas like the following : 
 
 Dum me mori est necesse, 
 Noli mihi tune deesse ; 
 In tremenda mortis hora 
 Veni Jesu absque mora ; 
 
 Tuere me et libera. 
 Cum me jubes emigrare, 
 Jesu care tune appare ; 
 O aniator amplectende, 
 Temet ipsum tune ostende 
 
 In cruce salutifera. 
 
 We have travelled far away from Begulus. Is it possible that 
 the language should be called the same ?
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 191 
 
 The Vulgate the word of God divulged, translated from 
 its Hebrew and its Greek into Latin for the common people 
 of the Western world what a success this book of Jerome's 
 had, and how it modified and moulded all the silent centuries 
 that made us what we are ! No other vulgarisateur has done 
 a millionth part of what S. Jerome did. Luther, Tyndal, 
 Diodati, the innumerable scribes of the Bible Society, have 
 spread abroad the sacred writings of the Jewish and the 
 Christian Church. Into each nation where these versions 
 penetrate, they bring a great and powerful tradition. Many of 
 them, the earlier in each case, rank as monuments of style. 
 Eleven centuries after the death of Jerome, two youthful 
 nations, the English and the German, became vocal for the 
 first time in vernacular translations of the Bible, and based 
 the rules of written language on their precedents. But what 
 was this in comparison with Jerome's work? His Bible 
 scattered and displaced the classics, erased the memories of 
 Borne and insolent Greece, undid Olympus, brought the 
 wrecks of the old world and the nebulous elements of the 
 modern world, Celts, Teutons, Norsemen, Goths, and what 
 not, into relation with the penetrative secrets of the Oriental 
 mind, the potent metaphysic of the Greek. 
 
 There is a book, steeped in the style of the Vulgate, which 
 possesses peculiar value as a link between the ancient and the 
 modern world. I mean the ' Confessions ' of S. Augustine. 
 Nothing like it had appeared before, so far as we have know- 
 ledge of antiquity. No self -revelation of a human soul had 
 hitherto been made with such free confidence. Nowhere else 
 could the same introspective analysis of doubts and motives 
 and desires be found. Subjectivity had never spoken out so 
 candidly, with less reserve, with less regard to artistic or 
 rhetorical effect. The distinguishing note of this book is 
 that the author of it has found his true self in God, and 
 pours his heart out to the God who understands him. In 
 this respect, S. Augustine anticipates the movement of the 
 modern world, and inaugurates a literature which only started 
 into plenitude of being nine centuries after his death in the 
 body. So tardy is the evolution of the human mind.
 
 192 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 S. Augustine paints in his ' Confessions ' the entire life 
 of his hybrid epoch : a pagan father and a Christian mother ; 
 the schools of African grammarians and Italian rhetoricians ; 
 the baths : the Carthaginian circus stained with blood, the 
 lawless lives of Koman cities ; the church at Milan and its 
 perils, the origin of monastic societies and the first beginnings 
 of ecclesiastical music ; conversions to the Christian faith, 
 baptisms, pagan honours paid to tombs of martyrs ; Manichean, 
 Pelagian, Neoplatonic, Arian heresies. We are introduced to 
 men wavering between philosophy and faith, Athens and 
 Jerusalem, uncertain which path to follow. We watch Latin 
 Christianity in the making ; and the man who relates all this 
 is one who powerfully helped to fix its outlines. The ' Con- 
 fessions ' paint the second half of the fourth century in the 
 spirit and the manner of a modern artist. Their style possesses 
 corresponding interest, because, although Augustine was him- 
 self a celebrated professor of rhetoric, his diction is anything 
 but classical. We find no trace of that laborious attempt to 
 reproduce the phrases and recapture the rhythms of past 
 literature, which marks the poetry of Claudian and Ausonius. 
 Augustine speaks in the new language, the Latin which 
 was moulding itself on Christian lines of thought for modern 
 uses. 
 
 The famous passage which describes Augustine's passion of 
 sorrow upon the death of a dearly beloved friend might be 
 chosen as an adequate example of this new style : 
 
 Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum ; et quicquid adspiciebam, 
 mors erat. Et erat mihi supplicium, et paterna domus mira infelicitas ; 
 et quidquid cum illo communicaveram, sine illo in cruciatum immanem 
 verterat. Expetebant eum undique oculi mei, et non dabatur mihi ; et 
 oderam omnia, quia non haberent eum ; nee mihi jam dicere poterant : 
 ecce veniet, sicut cum viveret, quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse 
 mihi magna qusestio, et interrogabam animam meam quare tristis esset, 
 et quare conturbaret me valde ; et nib.il noverat respondere mihi. Et si 
 dicebam : spera in Deurn, juste non obtemperabat ^ quia verior erat et 
 melior homo, quern carissimum amiserat, quam phantasma, in quod 
 sperare jubebatur. Solus fletus erat dulcis mihi, et successerat amico 
 meo in deliciis animi mei. Et nurre, Domine, jam ilia transierunt, et 
 tempore lenitum est vulnus meum.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 193 
 
 It would be delightful to linger in quotations over the 
 plangent melody of S. Augustine's prose, so resonant with the 
 modern cry of emotion : 
 
 Quo vobis adhuc et adhuc ambulare vias difficiles et laboriosas ? 
 Non est requies, ubi quaeritis earn. Quserite quod quseritis ; sed ibi 
 non est, ubi quaeritis. Beatam vitam quseritis in regione mortis : non 
 est illic. 
 
 But enough has been cited to indicate the style of the 
 ' Confessions.' This style fell, like every form of culture, 
 into decay during the Middle Ages. But when the Kevival 
 of Learning began, it was not so much from Cicero as from 
 Augustine that the founder of humanism drew inspiration and 
 borrowed his manner. Petrarch adored Cicero, but he loved 
 and felt at home with Augustine. To Augustine, as to a 
 bosom friend, he confided the troubles of his own heart in the 
 dialogues entitled ' Secretum.' The ' Confessions ' were for 
 him scaturientcs lachrymis Confessionum libri pages running 
 over with the fount of tears. When he climbed the Mont 
 Ventoux with his brother Gherardo in 1336, this book was in 
 his pocket. Lying there, with the Alps outstretched before 
 him and the Rhone majestically sweeping toward the sea, he 
 drew it forth, and by an accident similar to that which 
 happened to Augustine with Alypius in their garden at Milan, 
 his eyes chanced to fall upon this suggestive passage : 
 
 Et eunt homines admirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris, et 
 latissimos lapsus fluminum, et oceani ambitum, et gyros siderum, et 
 relinquunt se ipsos. 
 
 And men go abroad to gaze with wonder at the heights of mountains 
 and the mighty billows of the deep, and the lordly width of rivers flowing 
 down, and the circuit of ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, and leave 
 themselves unheeded. 
 
 Few things are more touching in the history of literature 
 than this spiritual comradeship Petrarch clasping hands with 
 Augustine across the Lethe of nine mediaeval centuries ; the 
 last man of the classic age and the first man of the modern 
 mingling their souls in sympathy of sentiment.
 
 194 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 Latin detains the analyst of national style, not without 
 reason, seeing that this language is the parent of so many 
 modern tongues and the mistress of all modern literature. 
 
 Italian might be regarded as a prolongation of Latin into 
 a third period of existence. It retains some of the Roman 
 qualities. Dante could write : 
 
 Dopo la dolorosa rotta quando 
 Carlo Magno perde la santa gesta, 
 Non sono si terribilmente Orlando. 
 
 Tasso made lines of sounding vocables like this : 
 Immense solitudini d' arena. 
 
 Machiavelli used a pen of steel, writing with a compressed 
 energy and simple regard for perspicuity which was worthy 
 of an Augustan. 
 
 Monumental strength is not, however, the specific quality 
 of the Italian language, and has rarely been aimed at by 
 Italian writers. The abundance of definite and indefinite 
 articles, the conjugation of verbs by auxiliaries, the frequency 
 of terminations in essero, ebbero, ossono, give a languor and 
 indecision to the style. Italian loiters and seems to hesitate. 
 Its characteristic is not rapidity, not robustness. The beauty 
 of liquid numbers and sonorous vowel-sounds makes it the 
 language of melody, and gives to the best Italian rhythms the 
 charm of a sustained cantilena. 
 
 I observed above, that the languages which exhibit the 
 highest capacity for style are those which combine loyalty to 
 their native traditions with plasticity, becoming with each 
 successive phase of culture more perfect instruments for the 
 expression of those ideas which are gradually introduced into 
 the common stock of civilisation. Now this is what the 
 Italian language has hitherto missed. Italian writers have 
 failed to cultivate the language on its plastic side, and 
 to keep it duly open to the influx of ideas. The result is
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 195 
 
 that Italian, in spite of its fine quality and classic finish, does 
 not take a very high rank as an organ of style. 
 
 This is due to accidents of growth, which find no exact 
 parallel in the history of any other nation. Long before 
 French attained to fixity, and while English was lisping in the 
 cradle, Italian produced a monumental poem, the 'Divine 
 Comedy.' Then followed Petrarch and Boccaccio, giving 
 exquisite form, in verse and prose, to the vernacular of medi- 
 aeval Tuscany. The Kevival of Learning directed attention 
 to antique masterpieces, and interrupted the natural develop- 
 ment of the mother tongue. When poets like Poliziano and 
 Ariosto, prose idyllists like Sannazzaro, men of letters like 
 Bembo, historians like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, resumed 
 Italian for the serious work of literature, the spirit of the age 
 already turned to criticism. Dialects flourished in every 
 province, and humanism supplied the common culture of the 
 nation. It was thought necessary to imitate the Tuscan 
 classics Petrarch for verse and Boccaccio for prose in 
 order to obtain one type of style for the scattered members of 
 the Italian family. Thus, writers who aimed at correctness 
 began already to look backward at a time when the intel- 
 lectual conditions of Europe demanded a free forward move- 
 ment. After the close of the sixteenth century Italian 
 literature was either scholarly, jejune, stiff, and empty of 
 ideas, because it followed models which were out of harmony 
 with the advance of modern thought ; or it was capricious, 
 fantastic, and barocco, because it tried to innovate within the 
 same narrow sphere of style. 
 
 Only men of the highest natural endowments could move 
 freely and express contemporary thought and feeling in diction 
 which had been so artificially and critically elaborated. At 
 the beginning of this century Leopardi handled his mother 
 tongue in verse and prose with greater mastery than any 
 other writer of that age. It may therefore be well to select 
 passages from his works which illustrate this classic style in 
 its perfection. 
 
 Piu volte io mi maraviglio meco medesimo come, ponghiamo caso, 
 Virgilio, esernpio supremo di perfezione agli scrittori, sia venuto e man- 
 
 o2
 
 196 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 tengasi in questa sommita di gloria. Perocche, quantunque io presuma 
 poco di me stesso, e creda non poter mai godere e conoscere ciascheduna 
 parte d' ogni suo pregio e d' ogni suo magistero ; tuttavia tengo per certo 
 che il massimo numero de' suoi lettori e lodatori non iscorge ne' poemi 
 suoi piu che una bellezza per ogni dieci o venti che a me, con molto 
 rileggerli e meditarli, viene pur fatto di scoprirvi. In vero io mi per- 
 suado che 1" altezza della stima e della riverenza verso gli scrittori 
 sommi, provenga comunemente, in quelli eziandio che li leggono e trat- 
 tano, piuttosto da consuetudine ciecamente abbracciata, che da giudizio 
 proprio e dal conoscere in quelli per veruna guisa un merito tale. 
 
 It is impossible to overrate the art displayed in the construc- 
 tion of this paragraph the ease with which the periods are 
 kept in hand, the balance of the clauses, and the harmony of 
 the cadences. Yet we are left with an impression of cum- 
 brous labour and circumlocution. The style seems stationary, 
 as though it could with difficulty be made to move along. 
 The thought is inadequate to the verbal machinery which has 
 been set going for its utterance. 
 In poetry the case is different : 
 
 Che fai tu, luna, in ciel ? dimmi, che fai, 
 
 Silenziosa luna ? 
 
 Sorgi la sera, e vai 
 
 Contemplando i deserti ; indi ti posi. 
 
 Ancor non sei tu paga 
 
 Di riandare i sempiterni calli ? 
 
 Ancor non prendi a schivo, ancor sei vaga 
 
 Di mirar queste valli ? 
 
 There we have the supreme beauty of Italian verse the sus- 
 tained cantilena of words which naturally sing and fall into 
 apparently inevitable rhythm. The poet seems to be merely 
 speaking. But the music is so clear, the movement of the 
 lines of varying length is so majestic, the thought is so per- 
 spicuous, that we seek no higher satisfaction of the intellectual 
 senses. 
 
 This noble manner of Leopardi could not lend itself to 
 light or rapid effects. It remains meditative, and culminates 
 in passages like the following, which describes the poet's 
 thoughts at night beneath the stars upon the lava of Vesuvius :
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 197 
 
 Sovente in queste piagge, 
 
 Che, desolate, a bruno 
 
 Veste il flotto indurate, e par che ondeggi, 
 
 Seggo la notte ; e su la mesta landa 
 
 In purissimo azzurro 
 
 Veggo dall' alto fiammeggiar le stelle, 
 
 Cui di lontan fa specchio 
 
 II mare, e tutto di scintille in giro 
 
 Per lo voto seren brillare il mondo. 
 
 E poi che gli occhi a quelle luci appunto, 
 
 Ch' a lor sembrano un punto, 
 
 E sono immense in guisa 
 
 Che un punto a petto a lor son terra e mare 
 
 Veracemente ; a cui 
 
 L' uomo non pur, ma questo 
 
 Globo ove 1' uomo 6 nulla, 
 
 Sconosciuto e del tutto : e quando miro 
 
 Quegli ancor piu senz' alcun fin remoti 
 
 Nodi quasi di stelle, 
 
 Ch' a noi paion qual nebbia, a cui non 1' uomo 
 
 E non la terra sol, ma tutte in uno, 
 
 Del numero infinite e della mole, 
 
 Cor 1' aureo sole insiem, le nostre stelle 
 
 sono ignote, o cosi paion come 
 
 Essi alia terra, un punto 
 
 Di luce nebulosa : al pensier mio 
 
 Che sembri allora, o prole 
 
 Dell' uomo ? 
 
 This winding labyrinth of words is brought to a conclusion, 
 as regards both sense and sound, so logically and so naturally 
 that we hardly pause to wonder at the art of style, the sus- 
 pension of thought, required for the achievement. It seems 
 like the unpremeditated utterance of a divine being whose 
 habitual speech is melody. And there is good foundation for 
 this first impression. If we reflect upon the poetry which 
 men like Heine and Matthew Arnold have produced in their 
 attempts at unrhymed verse of varying lengths, we shall per- 
 ceive the incontestable superiority of Italian as a musical vehicle. 
 The verbal artist cannot obtain similar results with German, 
 French, or English. Italian largely owes its quality to what 
 it has retained of Latin structure and of Latin collocation.
 
 198 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 There is another circumstance which must not be neglected 
 in the general survey of the growth of Italian style. The 
 nation was not only divided by dialects and united mainly by 
 a common tendency toward humanistic culture. It was also 
 for several centuries deprived of free political life, a central 
 capital, and a press adequate to the intellectual requirements 
 of an expansive people. Neither by public speaking, nor 
 by the conversation of enlightened coteries, nor yet by 
 journalism, had the Italian language proper opportunities 
 for unfolding its capacities and marching front to front with 
 modern thought. Almost suddenly, within our lifetime, 
 these disabilities were removed ; and no sooner could Italy 
 proclaim herself in fact a nation, than the classic style, of 
 which Leopardi was so great a nineteenth century master, 
 began to be displaced by revolutionary modes of expression 
 which cause pain to the purists, and which no sane critic of 
 language can regard as final. The difficulty under which a 
 mother tongue, artificially and critically fashioned like Italian, 
 suffers when it copes with ordinary affairs of modern life, is 
 illustrated by the fabrication of feeble vocables like panificio, 
 birrificio, cottonificio, and by newspaper jargon, of which the 
 following sentence from a police-court report is only a fair 
 specimen : 
 
 Tosto avvenuto 1' attentato la cameriera si e resa latitante e finora 
 non si pote mettersi sulle tracce. L' ufficiale ieri stava molto male, 
 tanto che vociferavasi fosse resa necessaria 1' amputazione della mano. 
 
 With reference to the jingle of inharmonious and weakly 
 phrases which are now invading the minor literature of Italy, 
 I remember the late Duke of Sermoneta inveighing in my 
 presence against the diction of the Chambers, its barbarous 
 neologisms, its total want of taste, its violation of the genius 
 of the language. 'Why cannot they use the golden speech 
 of the fourteenth century ? ' he asked. ' Everything can be 
 expressed in Italian of that epoch.' Alas, I thought to 
 myself, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur. Style which 
 sufficed the writer of the ' Fioretti di San Francesco ' will 
 not grapple with the exigencies of an age of scientific
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 199 
 
 discoveries and crumbling theologies and social and political 
 revolutions. 
 
 VI 
 
 French, being an analytical language, is encumbered with 
 auxiliary verbs, prepositions, explanatory and supplementary 
 conjunctions ' lex auxiliaires avoir et etre, le verbe faire, les 
 conjonctions encombrantes ; toute cette pouillerie de notre 
 prose franchise,' as a French critic puts it. Compared with 
 Italian, the vowel-sounds are poor, the volume and natural 
 rhythm of the vocables mediocre. Compared with English, 
 French lacks variety and compass. Compared with German, 
 the vocabulary is limited ; those concrete and suggestive 
 words which give scope to the metaphysical imagination are 
 wanting. 
 
 French might be described as the least endowed by nature 
 of the European languages-. It often happens, however, that 
 when the soil is poor, industry and tillage succeed in raising 
 finer crops than wave upon the fatter glebe of luckier neigh- 
 bours. So the intelligent attention paid to style in France, 
 and conscious and persistent cultivation of the language by 
 refined thinkers, the usage of a society pervious to ideas, of a 
 Court where dulness and grossness were accounted crimes, of 
 academies devoted to the study of diction, of drawing-rooms 
 in which piquancy of phrase gave point to conversation, of a 
 capital electric with the brain-life of modern civility this 
 effort to attain perfection, carried on through centuries by 
 an enlightened and exquisitely polished race, has rendered 
 French unrivalled in certain of the very highest qualities of 
 verbal utterance. 
 
 Style is not so much a matter of linguistic resources, as 
 of the art and tact with which those resources are husbanded 
 for use. If the French are less liberally endowed than some 
 of their neighbours, they have made more of the wealth at 
 their disposal. Every word of their comparatively limited 
 vocabulary has been vitalised, penetrated with suggestions, 
 cut and polished like a diamond of many facets, imbued with 
 psychological colour and association. The beauty of French
 
 200 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 style consists in the parsimony of the means employed, and 
 the manifold variety produced by the manipulation of those 
 means the feeling for exact values whereby simple words 
 are thrown into relief by juxtaposition and selection, the 
 justice of perception which discovers the right phrase and 
 sets it in precisely the right context, the strength which 
 comes from reserve, and the flexibility which is due to 
 unerring veracity of statement. In this way, some of the 
 effects which might seem to have been denied to the French 
 language effects of picturesque and coloured description, 
 effects of mystery, effects of aerial indistinctness and haunt- 
 ing sweetness are just those in which it is at present 
 unrivalled. 
 
 ' La nature de cette langue,' says Guy de Maupassant, 
 'est d'etre claire, logique et nerveuse.' It is the language 
 of logical precision, of lucidity and scientific accuracy, of 
 intelligence, curiosity, criticism, propriety. ' Elle ne se laisse 
 pas affaiblir, obscurcir ou corrompre.' It is the language 
 of aphorism, of epigram, of definition, of psychological dis- 
 crimination. Braced in the austere struggle after truth of 
 utterance, purged by the pursuit of exactitude, taught to be 
 satisfied with veracity of phrase, there is nothing subtle in 
 thought or evanescent in sentiment which escapes the grasp 
 of its fine nervous organ of expression. 
 
 This makes French the perfect instrument of prose ; not 
 of sublime poetry, for that demands qualities which the 
 language has failed to develop; not, peradventure, of the 
 noblest oratory, for that requires a density and volume 
 incompatible with the transparency specific to French ways 
 of thinking; but of written prose, inexhaustible in crisp 
 variety of rhythm and elasticity of phrase, never unmindful 
 of the laws which separate prose from metrical utterance. 
 
 'Get art de la Prose fra^aise,' exclaims Paul Bourget, 
 in a passage from which I have already quoted, 'heritage 
 rnagnifique de la grande civilisation romaine. Le jour ou 
 cet art disparaitrait, la conscience fra^aise serait bien malade, 
 car dans 1'ordre de 1'intelligence elle aurait perdu sa plus 
 indiscutable suprematie. Les langues se parlent sur toute
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 201 
 
 la surface du monde ; il est probable qu'il ne s'e"crit qu'une 
 seule prose, si Ton prend le mot dans le sens lapidaire et 
 definitif ou pouvait 1'entendre un lite-Live ou un Salluste ; 
 cette prose, c'est la notre. Inferieurs dans la po6sie aux 
 subtils et divins poetes Anglais, initi^s a la musique par 
 les maitres allemands, et aux arts plastiques par nos voisins 
 du midi, nous sommes les rois absolus de cette forme de 
 la Phrase Ecrite.' 
 
 Tbere is little to gainsay in this enthusiastic, yet carefully 
 measured, vindication by a French writer of his nation's 
 claim to supremacy. Tardily, perhaps, yet definitely, we 
 English people have come to acknowledge our own inferiority 
 in the art of prose, and the necessity we are under of learning 
 the rules of that art from French masters. 
 
 When we proceed to consider style as a branch of rhetoric, 
 it will be apparent what the phrase italicised above implies. 
 For the present, I wish to invite comparison between a 
 passage from M. Kenan's translation of the Book of Job 
 and the already quoted Latin of the Vulgate : 
 
 Que ne suis-je mort des le sein de ma mere, 
 Au sortir de ses entrailles, que n'expirai-je ! 
 
 Pourquoi deux genoux sont-ils venus me recevoir, 
 Et deux seins m'inviter a les sucer? 
 
 Maintenant je serais eouch6, je me reposerais, 
 Je dormirais dans une paix profonde, 
 
 Avec les rois et les grands de la terre, 
 Qui se batissent des mausolees, 
 
 Avec les princes qui possedent 1'or, 
 Et remplissent leur maison d'argent ; 
 
 Ou bien, comme 1'avorton cache", je n'existerais pas, 
 Comme les enfans qui n'ont pas vu la lumiere. 
 
 L& les me"chants cessent leurs violences, 
 La se repose 1'homme epuise". 
 
 This illustrates the limpidity and clearness of French style, 
 its grace of simple outline ; but it also illustrates the want of
 
 202 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 majesty, the sacrifice of grandeur, which we notice in the 
 French language when it competes with one more sombre 
 and poetical. ' Quelle joie pour Jacob, quelle allegresse pour 
 Israel,' in the French version of the Psalms, contrasts but 
 poorly with our own, 'Then shall Jacob rejoice, and Israel 
 shall be glad.' 
 
 VII 
 
 There is little in common between the languages of which 
 we have been thinking and German their Teutonic cousin 
 in the Aryan family. The complicated syntax of German 
 and its extraordinary richness render this language unrivalled 
 for the disengagement and articulation of the minutest shades 
 of thought. If natural resources and capacity for expression 
 were sufficient to constitute style, then German literature 
 ought to rank first among the literatures of Europe ; but the 
 exact opposite is the fact. Like the Roman Commonwealth, 
 in Livy's famous phrase, the German language ' magnitudine 
 laborat sua,' it flounders in its own voluminousness. That it 
 is both difficult and clumsy schwierig und schwerfallig 
 even Germans, if they are candid, admit. Foreigners know, 
 to their cost, that the perusal of an ordinary book of German 
 erudition demands thrice the time and twice the expenditure 
 of brain-force which are required by a French treatise. This 
 is partly due to the genius and history of the language, which, 
 until quite recently, has had no pains bestowed upon its style. 
 But it is even more the fault of German writers, who seem, as 
 a rule, culpably indifferent to propriety and beauty of expres- 
 sion. Abandoning themselves to the facility of their native 
 speech, revelling in its exuberance, abusing its plasticity, 
 inventing neologisms, importing foreign phrases wholesale, 
 they scribble without giving a thought to the art of diction, 
 and apparently without caring for precision in their ideas. 
 Whatever comes to the pen-point is put down on paper. If 
 one cumbrous sentence fails to hit the mark, instead of blot- 
 ting and remodelling, they produce a second and a third to 
 modify the imperfect impression. The result is that serious
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 203 
 
 thinkers are content to put forth simple thoughts in jargon 
 like the following : 
 
 Es bleibt uns deshalb nichts iibrig als den Begriff der Kunst so zu 
 sagen lemmatisch aufzunehmen, was bei alien besonderen philosophi- 
 schen Wissenschaften, wenn sie vereinzelt betrachtet werden sollen, der 
 Fall 1st. Denn erst die gesammte Philosophic ist die Erkenntniss de? 
 Universums als in sich eine organische Totalitat, die sich aus ihrem 
 eigenen Begriffe entwickelt, und in ihrer sich zu sich verhaltenden Noth- 
 wendigkeit zum Ganzen in sich zuriickgebend, sich mit sich als eine 
 Welt der Wahrheit zusammenschliesst. In der Krone dieser wissen- 
 schaftlichen Nothwendigkeit ist jeder einzelne Theil ebensosehr einer 
 Seits ein in sich zuruckkehrender Kreis, als er anderer Seits zugleich 
 einen nothwendigen Zusammenhang mit anderen Gebieten hat, ein 
 Riickwarts, aus dem er sich herleitet, wie ein Vorwarts, zu dem er selbst 
 in sich sich weiter treibt, insofern er frnchtbar Anderes wieder aus sich 
 erzeugt und fiir die wissenschaftliche Erkenntniss hervorgehen lasst. 
 
 This passage could not be translated literally into French ; 
 and the fact that it is incapable of conversion into style of 
 absolute veracity justifies our entertaining grave doubts as to 
 the soundness of its sense. When we succeed in grasping the 
 meaning, however, we find that it conveys a not very original 
 remark upon the relation of the subordinate branches of philo- 
 sophy to science in general, which might have been briefly 
 and modestly set forth. But to have expressed this notion 
 with French lucidity would have shorn the writer's thought of 
 its hazy impressiveness. The verbiage of Hegel adds a kind 
 of mystic grandeur, what the Greeks called o-e/AvoV^s, to 
 commonplace ideas enough ; and his reckless abuse of the 
 inexhaustible resources of the German language invests the 
 cobwebs of the speculative fancy with something like a 
 mythological concreteness. 
 
 The great strength of German lies in the unparalleled com- 
 pass and wealth of its vocabulary. There is nothing which 
 cannot be expressed in German by a native word, homely, 
 picturesque, appealing straight to the intelligence alike of 
 learned and unlearned. The phraseology of abstract thought 
 is concrete here ; it is also of native growth, not imported 
 from the Greek or Latin. Instead of incarnation, Germans
 
 204 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 speak of Fleischwerden or Verfleischung. Instead of relation, 
 definition, they use Verhaltniss, Bestimmung ; instead of con- 
 cept, Begriff. Some of their philosophical expressions, such 
 for instance as Weltanschauung, display an inimitable apti- 
 tude. Even the terms of physical science are not remote 
 from common life. Schwefel-saure explains itself more easily 
 than Acidus Sulphuricus. 
 
 Abstract disquisitions retain a vividness and picturesqueness 
 in German, which they never had in any other literature but 
 the Greek. We have, perhaps, to thank this quality of the 
 language what may be called the mythopoeic energy of its 
 vocabulary for the cloud-castle-realm of German metaphysics. 
 Ideas and distinctions which have no sound basis in fact, and 
 which are incapable of being expressed in a less imaginative 
 speech, obtain a specious aspect of reality and impose upon 
 the mind when clothed with phraseology so vital and so 
 concrete. 
 
 The same verbal privileges render German an admirable 
 vehicle for literal translation. Few turns of phrase and few 
 metrical effects are incapable of imitation in this language. 
 The native genius of the tongue, however, is so alien to classic 
 literature, that its ingenious versions from Greek and Latin 
 have the appearance of rough plaster-casts, rather than of 
 reproductions in some precious material. It is in dealing 
 with the masterpieces of a cognate literature, with Shake- 
 speare's plays, for example, that the inexhaustible riches of the 
 mother speech of Germany are best exhibited. 
 
 Considering the compass of German vocabulary and the 
 plasticity of the language as an instrument of style, it is 
 greatly to be deplored that average German writers are so 
 slovenly in the construction of their sentences, and so indolent 
 in their adoption of foreign and inharmonious elements. 1 
 
 1 I ran through two numbers of a local German newspaper the other 
 day, and noted the following barbarisms : Konstatiren, konveniren, 
 passiren, prosperiren, kompromettiren, blamiren, pramiren, projektiren, 
 reformiren, publiziren, korrigiren, patronisen, kulmirinen, kursiren, prasi- 
 diren, Debatte, Diskussion, Direktion, Hotelier, Instruktor, Eeferat, Kon- 
 kurrenz, Aktionar, Fraktionen, interressant, respektable, Konzessionar,
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 205 
 
 Carelessness, want of taste and tact, insensibility to form, 
 contempt for the genius and specific beauty of the native 
 idiom, seem to be ingrained vices of this literature. When we 
 reflect on what good German style might be what it has been 
 in the hands of men like Heine, Schopenhauer, Helmholz it 
 is really irritating not to be able to take up a book without at 
 once stumbling upon uglinesses like the following : 
 
 Bei einer intelligenten, sehr suggestiblen Warterin wirkten die 
 Suggestions a echeance so machtig, dass sie mir erklarte, sie sei absolut 
 iiberwaltigt und ware gezwungen, sogar einen Mord zu begehen, wenn 
 ich ihr denselben suggeriren wiirde, so furchtbar sei der Trieb, auch den 
 grossten Unsinn zu begehen. 
 
 It may be conceded that in an essay on Hypnotism, the 
 French phrase Suggestions d echeance is appropriate by 
 reason of its technical significance. Still we ask where is 
 the necessity for intelligent, suggestible, absolut, suggeriren ? 
 Why was the verb zu begehen tautologically repeated in so 
 short a sentence ? Why could not a little pains have been 
 bestowed on bettering the lame amorphous clauses on which 
 it limps to a conclusion ? 
 
 German prose, except in the case of a few rare stylists, 
 suffers from unwieldiness, cumbrous garrulity, circumlocu- 
 tion, and painfully prolonged suspension of thought through 
 labyrinths of qualifying clauses, parentheses, and otiose 
 
 Varianten, eventuell, konstant, serios, Stationen, Accord, Tapet, Billet, 
 splendid, Details, Honneurs. Some phrases were peculiarly offensive, as 
 these : Diese auffallige Coincidencz, diese theatercoup massige Insceni- 
 rung ; Emission der Aktien ; hindurchpilotirtes Projekt ; Kompetentester ; 
 plausibeln Rentabilitatsberechnungen. It may be urged that these 
 abominations are only discoverable in journalistic jargon. But news- 
 papers form the principal literature of the middle and lower classes. 
 Thus this commercial patois infiltrates common speech, and renders the 
 talk of all but highly polished people insufferable. If we have to seek a 
 valid excuse for the prevalent vulgarity of German prose, it should, 
 perhaps, be found in the social backwardness of the German people. They 
 need expressions which have become current through the usage of more 
 cultivated nations, especially the French, and which carry connotations 
 hitherto denied to their own Gothic vocabulary.
 
 206 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 excrescences. But there is another aspect of the literature. 
 In poetry and in simple narration it is not easy to match its 
 spontaneous and artless beauties. Heine's lyrics, for example, 
 have a lightness of touch, a purity of phrase, an irreproducible 
 grace of rhythm and haunting melody, the exact parallel to 
 which can nowhere else be found. The same qualities are 
 noticeable in the Marchen and in tales which have been 
 written in their manner. Sincere homeliness, deep, true 
 emotion, penetrating to the root and marrow of the human 
 heart, kindliness and honesty combined with shrewdness and 
 a broad calm survey of the world, are the notes of this part of 
 German literature. No other modern idiom has a set of words 
 like Gemiith, Innigkeit, fromm, bieder, hold, expressive of the 
 most lovable qualities of character. Their exact equivalents 
 cannot be found in English, French, Italian. There is some- 
 thing idiosyncratic to German emotion and to German spiritual 
 temperament in their form and sound. 
 
 VIII 
 
 English is the most composite of modern languages, 
 including as it does Teutonic, Celtic, Latin, and French 
 elements in the body of the idiom. It is also reduced to 
 the simplest grammatical form. Nouns are not declined : 
 genders, except for persons, have been discarded ; verbs are 
 conjugated mainly by the help of auxiliaries. To say that 
 English has no grammar would be an exaggeration. But 
 it certainly has less of grammar than any other literary 
 language. 
 
 The variety of its vocabulary and the simplicity of its 
 grammar are two main advantages of English, rendering it 
 full of verbal suggestiveness and manageable as an instru- 
 ment of expression. Among its prominent drawbacks may 
 be reckoned imperfect (though copious) vowel-sounds, the 
 frequency of sibilants, and the wearisome recurrence of little 
 words like the, a, which, that, of. Glad as we may be for 
 many reasons to have abolished the genders of sexless things, 
 we cannot but feel that a certain loss is involved in this
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 207 
 
 simplification. Declined substantives, adjectives, 'articles, 
 relatives, participles, animate the diction of both poetry and 
 prose, and help to determine the logical order of sentences by 
 means of their terminal forms. 
 
 Owing to the complicated pedigree of the English language, 
 our metrical systems offer insurmountable difficulties to the 
 analyst. We have to deal with verse which depends for its 
 effect on accent rather than quantity, and in which two 
 traditions that of Anglo-Saxon rhythm and that of classical 
 scansion by feet have become inextricably intertwined. In 
 addition to these double influences, the old alliterative forms 
 of poetry demand attention. The ear in English versification 
 is still reminiscent of lines which were governed by consonants 
 repeated in emphatic places of the metre. Blank verse of 
 highly elaborated structure combines three factors (native 
 rhythm, classical scansion, and alliterative appeal to the sense 
 of recurrent consonantal sounds) in proportions varying with 
 the poet's aim or instinct. It is impossible to analyse the 
 versification of Milton's ' Paradise Lost ' wholly by the laws 
 of Greek and Latin prosody. It is equally impossible to 
 explain it, as Dr. Guest in his learned treatise on English 
 Rhythms would have us do, by reference only to the sections 
 and the pauses of Anglo-Saxon measures. The peculiar 
 charm of Miltonic blank verse is due to the admixture of both 
 systems in a hybrid peculiar to England after the introduction 
 of humanistic studies. Again, it is impossible to overlook the 
 deliberate alliteration of such lines as the following : 
 
 Far off from these a slow and silent stream, 
 Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls 
 Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks 
 Forthwith his former state and being forgets, 
 Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. 
 
 The flexibility of English renders our versification not unlike 
 that of the Greeks. It is true that the uncertainty of our 
 syllabic utterance, and the insensibility of our ear to quanti- 
 tative values, preclude us from acclimatising metres (like the 
 hexameter), which depend upon dactyls and spondees. Yet
 
 208 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 the iambic and trochaic measures of dramatic dialogue in 
 Attic Greek and in English, owing to the way in which both 
 languages blend short and long words, are closely similar. 
 
 Take this example : 
 
 Ah, dear Juliet, 
 
 Why art thou yet so fair ? Shall I believe 
 That unsubstantial death is amorous, 
 And that the lean abhorred monster keeps 
 Thee here in dark to be his paramour ? 
 For fear of that, I still will stay with thee : 
 And never from this palace of dim night 
 Depart again : here, here will I remain 
 With worms that are thy chamber-maids ; O, here 
 Will I set up my everlasting rest, 
 And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
 From this world-wearied flesh. 
 
 Some of the loveliest effects in English poetry are obtained 
 by the artful use of monosyllables : 
 
 Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all ! 
 What hast thou then more than thou hadst before ? 
 No, love, my love, that thou mayst true love call : 
 And mine was thine before thou hadst this more. 
 
 Some of its most striking rhetorical effects depend upon a 
 single polysyllabic word set at the right point in a rush of 
 monosyllables : 
 
 Can man by no means creep out of himself, 
 And leave the slough of viperous grief behind ? 
 
 An English poet is compelled to get value out of the short 
 words in which our language abounds. According to his use 
 of them, the line may run like : 
 
 Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, 
 
 or may linger like : 
 
 Showers, hails, snows, frosts, and two-edged winds that prime ; 
 
 for short words in English, according to their weight and 
 volume, either wing the verse with feathers, or encumber it 
 with chains of lead.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 209 
 
 The hybrid nature of English prosody renders emphasis a 
 main feature of our versification. Accentual rhythm formed 
 the original and native groundwork of English prosody. 
 This soon began to be modified by scansion. Learned poets, 
 familiar with the quantitative systems of antiquity, allowed 
 their ear to be governed in the act of composition by memories 
 of Greek or Latin metres. Yet exactitude in the quantitative 
 structure even of iambics has not been insisted on, and con- 
 sequently the most remarkable effects may be produced in 
 English by violations of classical rules which would have 
 made an Attic audience shudder. No other literature more 
 often illustrates than ours the metrical and rhetorical impor- 
 tance of a word placed so as to surprise the hearer's sense or 
 to arrest his attention by some bold irregularity. Notice the 
 value of the verb streams in this line of Marlowe : 
 
 See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament. 
 
 English prose is also hybrid ; but in some respects the 
 amalgam has not been made so successfully as in the case of 
 poetry. Starting with the simplicity of Anglo-Saxon and 
 early English style, where the leading characteristics of our 
 syntax are already defined, prose underwent a thorough 
 French remodelling during the reigns of the Norman and 
 Angevine monarchs. The result of this first period of fusion 
 is visible in the style of Sir Thomas Malory's ' Morte 
 d' Arthur ' ; it may be illustrated by the passage in which 
 King Arthur departs for his last journey across the waters of 
 the west : 
 
 ' Now put me into the barge,' said the King ; and so he did softly ; 
 and there received him three queens with great mourning, and so those 
 three queens set them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid 
 his head. And then that queen said, ' Ah ! dear brother, why have ye 
 tarried so long from me ? Alas ! this wound on your head hath taken 
 overmuch cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedi- 
 vere beheld all those ladies go from him ; then Sir Bedivere cried, ' Ah ! 
 my lord Arthur, what shall become of me now ye go from me, and leave 
 me here alone among mine enemies ? ' ' Comfort thyself,' said King 
 Arthur, ' and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to trust 
 in ; for I will into the vale of Avilion for to heal me of my grievous 
 
 P
 
 210 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 wound ; and if thou never hear more of me, pray for my soul.' But 
 evermore the queens and ladies -wept and shrieked that it was pity for 
 to hear them. And as soon as Sir Bedivere had lost sight of the barge, 
 he wept and wailed ; and so he went all the night, and in the morn- 
 ing he was ware between two hills of a chapel and a hermitage. 
 
 Translation played a very important part in the moulding 
 of English literature. The 'Morte d' Arthur' was avowedly 
 a condensed version of several French romances, executed at 
 a time when French had hardly ceased to be the language of 
 the court and law. During the first quarter of the sixteenth 
 century, the English Bible assumed that shape which is 
 familiar to every one in the old authorised version. It was 
 the translation of books already well known through the 
 Latin of the Vulgate ; and though the translators went at 
 first hand to the original languages of both Old and New 
 Testaments, their choice of rhythm, phrase, and vocable was 
 to a great extent determined by Jerome's example. 
 
 Why died I not from the womb ? why did I not give up the ghost 
 when I came out of the belly ? 
 
 Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should 
 suck? 
 
 For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept : 
 then had I been at rest. 
 
 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places 
 for themselves ; 
 
 Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver : 
 
 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been ; as infants which 
 never saw light. 
 
 There the wicked cease from troubling ; and there the weary be at 
 rest. 
 
 The mixture of native with French or Latin words with 
 present, quiet, counsellor, desolate, prince, infant, cease has 
 been accomplished ; but the syntax still retains its early 
 English simplicity. 
 
 While the Bible was circulating among the people through 
 the medium of the press, England awoke to the new learning, 
 and submitted to the charm of Italian humanism. A third 
 process of fusion now further modified our prose style.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 211 
 
 Writers, belonging for the most part to the scholarly classes, 
 began to use their mother tongue according to the rules of 
 Latin syntax. They did not merely transplant a multitude 
 of Latin nouns, adjectives, and verbs with slight terminal 
 alteration into the vocabulary. In so far as they did so they 
 were only continuing the process already at work in the style 
 of the Bible. But they also constructed periodic sentences, 
 and built up paragraphs in the manner of the Roman rheto- 
 ricians. It would be interesting to trace the development of 
 this humanistic use of language through Bacon, Jonson, 
 Burton, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy 
 Taylor. These masters of English prose were obeying an 
 instinct somewhat similar to that which moved the poets in 
 their attempt to assimilate English verse rhythms to classical 
 metres. But the language did not lend itself kindly to the 
 periodic structure they affected. What had been done in 
 Latin by means of terminal forms declined nouns and 
 adjectives, inflected verbs, genders those natural artifices 
 of the tongue, which secured lucid and logical arrangement 
 in the most complicated windings of a sentence had now 
 to be attempted by linking together and interconnecting the 
 short phrases which are proper to the genius of English. 
 Consequently, those labyrinthine edifices seem to be compact 
 of loosely welded parts, not wrought into a vitally organic 
 whole. The incoherence and awkwardness of humanistic 
 prose in England reach their climax in some of Milton's 
 cumbrous periods. Sentence, sub-sentence, parenthesis, quali- 
 fying clause, are only kept together by a liberal expenditure 
 of what may be described as verbal hooks and eyes. This 
 passage on Marriage from the ' Doctrine of Divorce ' illus- 
 trates the intricacy of Milton's style, together with its 
 rhetorical sublimity : 
 
 Marriage is a covenant the very being whereof consists in unfeigned 
 love and peace ; and of matrimonial love, no doubt but that was chiefly 
 meant which by the ancient sages was thus parabled : that Love, if he 
 be not twin-born, yet hath a wondrous brother like him, called Anteros, 
 whom while he seeks all about, his chance is to meet with many false 
 and feigning desires, that wander singly up and down in his likeness.
 
 212 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 By them, in their borrowed garb, Love, though not wholly blind, as Poets 
 wrong him, yet having but one eye, as being an archer aiming, and that 
 eye not the quickest in this dark region here below, which is not Love's 
 proper sphere, partly out of the simplicity and credulity which is natural 
 to him, often deceived, embraces and consorts him with the obvious and 
 suborned striplings, as if they were his mother's own sons, for so he 
 thinks them. But after a while, as his manner is, when soaring up into 
 the high tower of his Apogseum, above the shadow of the earth, he darts 
 out the rays of his most piercing eyesight, upon the impostures and trim 
 disguises that were used with him, and discerns that this is not his 
 genuine brother, as he imagined : he has no longer the power to hold 
 fellowship with such a personated mate ; for straight his arrows lose 
 their golden heads and shed their purple feathers, his silken braids un- 
 twine, and slip their knots, and that original and fiery virtue given him 
 by Fate all on a sudden goes out, and leaves him undeified and despoiled 
 of all his force ; till, finding Anteros at last, he kindles and repairs the 
 almost faded ammunition of his deity, by the reflection of a co-equal and 
 homogeneal fire. Thus mine author sung it to me ; and by the leave of 
 those who would be counted the only grave ones, this is no mere ama- 
 torious novel (though to be wise and skilful in these matters, men, 
 heretofore of greatest name in virtue, have esteemed it one of the highest 
 arcs that human contemplation, circling upwards, can make from the 
 globy sea whereon she stands) : but this is a deep and serious verity, 
 showing that love in marriage cannot live nor subsist unless it be mutual. 
 
 If we inquire what English prose gained in this humanistic 
 period, we shall find that the range and compass of the lan- 
 guage were widely extended, that new and richer rhythms 
 were added to its cadences, and that its capacity for the 
 construction of majestic monumental sentences was proved. 
 
 There are sicknesses that walk in darkness ; and there are exter- 
 minating angels, that fly wrapt up in the curtains of immateriality and 
 an uncommunicating nature ; whom we cannot see, but we feel their 
 force, and sink under their sword ; and from heaven the veil descends 
 that wraps our heads in the fatal sentence. 
 
 It was surely a great gain to have learned to write thus 
 with Jeremy Taylor, or as thus with Thomas Browne : 
 
 But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the 
 grave, solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting 
 ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 213 
 
 In our English literature, the language of poetry has never 
 differed essentially from the language of prose. Think of 
 Jonson's, Milton's, Dryden's use of both. Think of the 
 simultaneous revival of Elizabethan wealth and colour in 
 the diction of both poetry and prose during the nineteenth 
 century. Yet English has been, upon the whole, most success- 
 fully handled for the purposes of verse. That is due, I think, 
 partly to the genius of the idiom and its literary history, 
 partly to the attitude of writers. The simplicity of our 
 grammar, combined with the richness and variety of our 
 vocabulary, renders the language specially fit for poetic utter- 
 ance, where the phrase is always brief and vibrating ; less fit 
 for organised and periodic eloquence, to which it was so ruth- 
 lessly adapted by the humanistic stylists. The humanists 
 improved versification by their sympathy with classic metre. 
 They went near to ruining prose by their imitation of Latin 
 syntactical forms, and checked the natural evolution of our 
 oratio soluta on the lines of early French. Something has 
 always remained of lumbering and slipshod in the structure 
 of long English sentences. Authors, who had no skill in 
 building up periods like Taylor's or Browne's, thought them- 
 selves justified by those eminent examples in floundering 
 through jungles of plethoric phrases loosely tacked together 
 by conjunctions. 
 
 The incoherence of bad English prose is only less desolating 
 than that of common German prose. I will illustrate my 
 meaning by examples of slipshod, clumsy, or obscure sentences 
 extracted from the published essays of the late Mark Pattison. 
 I choose him because he is upon the whole a vigorous writer, 
 and because he was invariably a severe critic merciless to 
 those who fell short of an ideal of scholarship which he had 
 formed. It is difficult to believe, however, that the man 
 who wrote as follows, can have thought with the exactitude 
 pertaining to true scholarship. 
 
 In England it was known from Poggio's report in 1418 that no 
 inedited new classics were to be hoped for. 1 
 
 1 Pattisoris Essays, vol. i. p. 91.
 
 214 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 What Pattison has said here is that the English, after 
 Poggio's report in 1418, did not expect the discovery of any 
 fresh and inedited classics. What he meant to say was, that 
 no such classics were to be hoped for in England. 
 
 The conflicting claims of his Muse and a fiery Turk which he had 
 bought at the Frankfort fair had once liked to have proved fatal to 
 him. 1 
 
 This is awkward and of doubtful grammar, as is also the 
 following from the same paragraph : 
 
 Perhaps we have to thank the road for a good deal more than we often 
 think of the ocean of mediocre Latin verse which the sixteenth century 
 bequeathed to us. 
 
 To any one who is at all an artist in language, a sentence 
 so cacophonously crowded with four thats as the one which I 
 shall now quote, gives absolute pain : 2 
 
 We are not quite sure that that Father is not giving us Tollius amplified 
 with that latitude of invention which local history at that period allowed 
 itself. 
 
 The next specimen contains two of the commonest and 
 vulgarest faults of slipshod English : 3 
 
 Of the period of thirty years, 1563-1594, not more than half was 
 actually spent by Scaliger under his patron's roof. But it was always 
 open to him, and his books and papers his only property- -seem to have 
 been deposited in one of his Poitevin chateaux. 
 
 The it and his which I have italicised, are the peccant 
 parts of this intolerable sentence. A roof ought never to be 
 open ; and it would have been no advantage to Scaliger 
 should he have been always able to reckon upon finding an 
 open roof in his patron's mansion. After the repeated him, 
 his, and his, the third his both logically and grammatically 
 refers to Scaliger. Yet the brain, tortured by reiteration, 
 eventually relegates it to the patron who kept a portion of 
 his roof always open for a scholar guest. 
 
 1 Pattison's Essays, vol. i. p. 98. 2 Ibid. p. 110. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 139.
 
 NATIONAL STYLE 215 
 
 The following sentence might be proposed as a puzzle to 
 school-boys. Examine and analyse its structure. You will 
 find it difficult to determine whether Scaliger or Muretus was 
 the old friend and the guest : ! 
 
 In September, 1562, Muretus came to France, and as an old friend 
 of his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and his guest at Agen, Joseph was as 
 much with him as Muret's only occasional visit to Paris from Charlieu 
 made possible. 
 
 Take the next, and explain to which of the plurals in this pro- 
 position the italicised word their should logically be referred : 2 
 
 Not so many places were ravaged by the Protestants as suffered 
 from the Catholic troops, but as many or more in proportion to their 
 numbers. 
 
 I have chosen these instances of slovenly writing almost 
 at random from Mr. Pattison's justly famous Quarterly 
 articles on the Stephenses and Scaliger, and from the 
 fragment of his ' Life of Joseph Scaliger.' They show that 
 in England even a thinker so vigorous, a man of learning so 
 exact, and a critic so scrupulous as the late Eector of Lincoln 
 College, is capable of ignoring the graces of form, and 
 violating the rules of language. Mr. Pattison pours contempt 
 on French schon-geisterei, girds at the shallowness of Italian 
 erudition, and utters the astonishing paradox that ' disgust 
 at pedantry prevents French writing from ever rising above 
 the level of good drawing-room conversation." 3 Yet when 
 he uses his own mother tongue, he blunders into linguistic 
 errors which would have brought the ferule of the pedagogue 
 down with force upon the knuckles of Poliziano, and which 
 M. Nisard would have accounted more discreditable than a 
 false quantity. If learning, long study of the Greek and 
 Latin classics, and the aristocratic habit of mind which lends 
 an almost arrogant hauteur to this exacting scholar, could not 
 preserve him from such ugly vulgarisms, we have the right 
 to demand more of schon-geisterei and less of scientific 
 pedantry. 
 
 1 Pattism's Essays, vol. i. p. 206. 2 Ibid. p. 235. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 116.
 
 216 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 Less attention has hitherto been paid to prose in England 
 than to poetry. Spontaneity and freedom I had almost 
 written insubordination are distinctive notes of the English 
 literary spirit. We do not readily submit to the discipline 
 of academies or the dictates of arch-critics. We are intolerant 
 of rules, and jealous lest so-called ' correction ' should impair 
 the native force of the idiom. What genius and instinct 
 enable us to do, is done vigorously and well. Therefore 
 poetry, being, as Mr. M. Arnold observed, mainly a matter 
 of genius, has thriven in our island ; and without self- 
 laudation we can challenge all literatures, except perhaps 
 the Greek, to match the English in this field. But the 
 rhythms, the cadences, the necessary limitations, the specific 
 graces of prose style, considered as a branch of literary art, 
 have been neglected. Few people who read English prose 
 reflect upon the manner of a writer. They are satisfied if 
 they can grasp his meaning, and require from him no more, 
 being apparently unconscious of the psychological relation 
 between thought and its expression. Much has still to be 
 done by us before the just medium between bald, breathless 
 prepositions and cumbrous, long-winded periods shall be 
 reached. The elasticity, the vivid clarity of phrase, the 
 distinction of each several proposition, which characterise 
 the more felicitously developed organ of written speech in 
 France, have yet to be attained by us. It might almost be 
 asserted that we are at present as far behind the French 
 as the Germans are behind ourselves in the art of average 
 prose.
 
 Part HI 
 
 PERSONAL STYLE 
 
 A SUKVEY of language, however superficial, makes it evident 
 that when we speak of style, we have to take into account 
 those qualities of national character which are embodied in 
 national speech. If two men could be born of precisely the 
 same physical, mental, and moral nature, at precisely the same 
 moment of history, and under precisely the same social con- 
 ditions ; and if these men learned different languages in the 
 cradle, and used those languages in after life, they would be 
 unable to deliver exactly the same message to the world 
 through literature. The dominant qualities of each mother 
 tongue would impose definite limitations on their power 
 of expressing thoughts, however similar or identical those 
 thoughts might be. 
 
 We cannot conceive two men born with the same physical, 
 mental, and moral nature, at the same moment, under pre- 
 cisely the same conditions, and using the same language. 
 They would be identical ; and everything they uttered would 
 be clothed with exactly the same words. The absurdity of 
 this conception brings home to us the second aspect of style. 
 Style is not merely a sign of those national qualities which 
 are generic to established languages, and which constitute the 
 so-called genius of a race. It is also the sign of personal 
 qualities, specific to individuals, which constitute the genius 
 of a man. Whatever a man utters from his heart and head 
 is the index of his character. The more remarkable a person
 
 218 Is 7 OTES ON STYLE 
 
 is, the more strongly he is differentiated from the average of 
 human beings, the more salient will be the characteristic notes 
 of his expression. But even the commonest people have, each 
 of them, a specific style. The marks of difference become 
 microscopical as we descend from Dante or Shakespeare to 
 the drudges of the clerk's desk in one of our great cities. Yet 
 these marks exist, and are no less significant of individuality 
 than the variations between leaf and leaf upon the lime trees 
 of an avenue. 
 
 It may be asked whether the manner of expression peculiar 
 to any person is a complete index to his character whether, 
 in other words, there is ' an art to find the mind's construc- 
 tion' in the style. Not altogether and exhaustively. Not 
 all the actions and the utterances of an individual betray the 
 secret of his personality. You may live with men and women 
 through years, by day, by night, yet you will never know the 
 whole about them. No human being knows the whole about 
 himself. 
 
 The deliberate attitude adopted by a literary writer implies 
 circumspection ; invites suppression, reservation, selection ; 
 is compatible with affectation, dissimulation, hypocrisy. So 
 much cannot be claimed for critical analysis as that we should 
 pretend to reproduce a man's soul after close examination of 
 his work. What we may assert with confidence is that the 
 qualities of style are intimately connected with the qualities 
 and limitations of the writer, and teach us much about him. 
 He wrote thus and thus, because he was this or this. In the 
 exercise of style it is impossible for any one to transcend his 
 inborn and acquired faculties of ideation, imagination, sense- 
 perception, verbal expression just as it is impossible in the 
 exercise of strength for an athlete to transcend the limits of 
 his physical structure, powers of innervation, dexterity, and 
 courage. 1 The work of art produced by a writer is therefore, 
 of necessity, complexioned and determined by the inborn and 
 acquired faculties of the individual. This is what we mean 
 by the hackneyed epigram : ' Le style c'est 1'homme.' 
 
 See Emile Hennequin, La Critique Scientifique, pp. 64-67, for 
 a lull and luminous exposition of these points.
 
 PERSONAL STYLE 219 
 
 II 
 
 Certain broad distinctions of moral and emotional tempera- 
 ment may undoubtedly be detected in literary style. A 
 tendency toward exaggeration, toward self-revelation, toward 
 emphasis upon the one side ; a tendency to reserve, to 
 diminished tone in colouring, to parsimony of rhetorical 
 resource upon the other : these indicate expansiveness or 
 reticence in the writer. Victor Hugo differs by the breadth 
 of the whole heavens from Leopardi. One man is ironical 
 by nature, another sentimental. Sterne and Heine have a 
 common gift of humour ; but the quality of humour in each 
 case is conditioned by sympathetic or by caustic under- 
 currents of emotion. Sincerity and affectation, gaiety and 
 melancholy, piety and scepticism, austerity and sensuality 
 penetrate style so subtly and unmistakably that a candid 
 person cannot pose as the mere slave of convention, a boon 
 companion cannot pass muster for an anchorite, the founder 
 of a religious sect cannot play the part of an agnostic. In 
 dramatic work the artist creates characters alien from his own 
 personality, and exhibits people widely different from himself 
 acting and talking as they ought to do. This he achieves by 
 sympathy and intuition. Yet all except the very greatest fail 
 to render adequately what they have not felt and been. In 
 playwrights of the second order, like our Fletcher, or of the 
 third order, like our Byron, the individual who writes the 
 tragedy and shapes the characters is always apparent under 
 every mask he chooses to assume. And even the style of the 
 greatest, their manner of presenting the varieties of human 
 nature, betrays individual peculiarities. yEschylus sees men 
 and women differently from Sophocles, Corneille from Racine, 
 Shakespeare from Goethe. 
 
 In like manner the broad distinctions of mental tempera- 
 ment may be traced in style. The abstract thinker differs from 
 the concrete thinker in his choice of terms ; the analytical 
 from the synthetic ; the ratiocinative from the intuitive ; the 
 logical from the imaginative ; the scientific from the poetical. 
 One man thinks in images, another in formal propositions.
 
 920 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 One is diffuse, and gets his thought out by reiterated state- 
 ment. Another makes epigrams, and finds some difficulty in 
 expanding their sense or throwing light upon them by illus- 
 trations. One arrives at conclusions by the way of argument. 
 Another clothes assertion with the tropes and metaphors of 
 rhetoric. 
 
 The same is true of physical and aesthetical qualities. They 
 are felt" inevitable in style. The sedentary student dees not 
 use the same figures of speech as come naturally to the 
 muscular and active lover of field sports. According as the 
 sense for colour, or for sound, or for light, or for form shall 
 preponderate in a writer's constitutions, his language will 
 abound in references to the world, viewed under conditions of 
 colour, sound, light, or form. He will insensibly dwell upon 
 those aspects of things which stimulate his sensibility and 
 haunt his memory. Thus, too, predilections for sea or moun- 
 tains, for city-life or rural occupations, for flowers, precious 
 stones, scents, birds, animals, insects, different kinds of food, 
 torrid or temperate climates, leave their mark on literary 
 style. 
 
 Acquired faculties a ad habits find their expression in style 
 no less than inborn qualities. Education, based upon 
 humanism or scientific studies ; contact with powerful per- 
 sonalities at an impressible period of youth; enthusiasm 
 aroused for this or that great masterpiece of literature ; social 
 environment ; high or low birth ; professional training for the 
 bar, the church, medicine, or commerce ; life in the army, at 
 sea, upon a farm, and so forth, tinge the mind and give a 
 more or less perceptible colour to language. 
 
 The use of words itself yields, upon analysis, valuable 
 results illustrative of the various temperaments of authors. 
 A man's vocabulary marks him out as of this sort or that 
 sort his preference for certain syntactical forms, for short 
 sentences or for periods, for direct or inverted propositions, 
 for plain or figurative statement, for brief or amplified illus- 
 trations. Some compose sentences, but do not build para- 
 graphs like Emerson ; some write chapters, but cannot 
 construct a book. Nor is punctuation to be disregarded,
 
 PERSONAL STYLE 221 
 
 inasmuch as stops enable us to measure a writer's sense of 
 time-values, and the importance he attaches to several degrees 
 of rest and pause. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is impossible to do more than indicate some of the 
 leading points which illustrate the meaning of the saying that 
 style is the man ; anyone can test them and apply them for 
 himself. We not only feel that Walter Scott did not write 
 like Thackeray, but we also know that he could not write like 
 Thackeray, and vice versd. This impossibility of one man 
 producing work in exactly the same manner as another makes 
 all deliberate attempts at imitation assume the form of parody 
 or caricature. The sacrifice of individuality involved in 
 scrupulous addiction to one great master of Latin prose, 
 Cicero, condemned the best stylists of the Renaissance men 
 like Muretus to lifeless and eventually worthless production. 
 Meanwhile the exact psychology is wanting which would 
 render our intuitions regarding the indissoluble link between 
 style and personal character irrefutable. 1 
 
 Literary style is more a matter of sentiment, emotion, 
 involuntary habits of feeling and observing, constitutional 
 sympathy with the world and men, tendencies of curiosity 
 and liking, than of the pure intellect. The style of scientific 
 works, affording little scope for the exercise of these psycho- 
 logical elements, throws less light upon their authors' tempera- 
 ment than does the style of poems, novels, essays, books of 
 travel, descriptive criticism. In the former case all that need 
 be aimed at is lucid exposition of fact and vigorous reasoning. 
 In the latter, the fact to be stated, the truth to be arrived at, 
 being of a more. complex nature, involves a process akin to 
 that of the figurative arts. The stylist has here to produce 
 
 While I was engaged in writing this essay, a young French author, 
 now, alas 1 dead, sent me a book which may be considered as an 
 important contribution to the psychology of style. It is entitled, 
 La Critique Scientifique, par Emile Hennequin. Paris : Perrin et 
 Cie., 1888.
 
 222 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 the desired effect by suggestions of infinite subtlety, and to 
 present impressions made upon bis sensibility. 
 
 Autobiographies, epistolary correspondence, notes of table- 
 talk, are of the highest value in determining the correlation 
 between a writer's self and his style. We not only derive a 
 mass of information about Goethe's life from Eckermann, but 
 we also discover from those conversations in how true a sense 
 the style of Goethe's works grew out of his temperament and 
 experience. Gibbon and Rousseau, Alfieri and Goldoni, 
 Samuel Johnson in his ' Life ' by Bos well, John Stuart Mill 
 in his autobiographical essay, Petrarch in his ' Secretum ' and 
 fragment of personal confessions, have placed similar keys 
 within our reach for unlocking the secret of their several 
 manners. 
 
 The rare cases in which men of genius have excelled in 
 more than one branch of art are no less instructive. Michel 
 Angelo the sonnet-writer helps us to understand Michel 
 Angelo the sculptor. Rossetti the painter throws light on 
 Rossetti the poet ; William Blake the lyrist upon William 
 Blake the draughtsman. We find, on comparing the double 
 series of work offered by such eminent and exceptionally 
 gifted individuals, that their styles in literature and plastic 
 art possess common qualities, which mark the men and issue 
 from their personalities. Michel Angelo in the sonnets is as 
 abstract, as ideal, as form-loving, as indifferent to the charm 
 of brilliant colour, as neglectful of external nature as Michel 
 Angelo in his statues and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. 
 Rossetti's pictures, with their wealth of colour, their elaborate 
 execution, their sharp incisive vision, their deep imaginative 
 mysticism and powerful perfume of intellectual sensuousness, 
 present a close analogue to his ballads, sonnets, and descrip- 
 tive poems. With these and similar instances in our mind, 
 we are prepared to hear that Victor Hugo designed pictures 
 in the style of Gustave Dor6 ; nor would it surprise us to 
 discover that Gustave Dor6 had left odes or fiction in the 
 manner of Victor Hugo. 
 
 The problems suggested by style as a sign and index of 
 personality may be approached from many points of view. I
 
 PERSONAL STYLE 223 
 
 have not aimed at exhaustiveness even of suggestion in my 
 treatment of the topic ; and while saying much which will 
 appear perhaps trivial and obvious, have omitted some of the 
 subtler and more interesting aspects of the matter. A syste- 
 matic criticism of personal style would require a volume, 
 and would demand physiological and psychological knowledge 
 which is rarely found in combination with an extensive study 
 of literatures and arts.
 
 THE ART OF STYLE 
 
 ' THE choice and command of language,' said Gibbon, ' is 
 the fruit of exercise.' Every writer has it in his power to 
 improve his faculty of expression, as every athlete can improve 
 his muscular development by practice. 
 
 The final end of all style is precision, veracity of utterance, 
 truth to the thing to be presented. The thing itself will 
 differ in simplicity and complexity, in scientific aridity 
 and in emotional richness, in imaginative grandeur and in 
 passionate intensity. Style, regarded from the point of 
 view of art, adapts itself to these differences in the subject- 
 matter. Whether consciously or unconsciously, is not at 
 present the question. It suffices to say that style (if worthy 
 of the name) finds the pure phrase the fitting mode of 
 utterance. It rejects superfluities, admits ornament where 
 ornament is part and parcel of the thing to be presented, 
 seeks beauty in truth, selects, discards, mindful always that 
 there is one and only one absolutely right way of saying 
 anything. 
 
 This is as true of poetry as of prose. Phrases like : 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong : 
 
 or like : 
 
 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is ; 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own !
 
 THE AET OF STYLE 225 
 
 have to be regarded as simple propositions, no less simple 
 than these which follow : 
 
 So ended this great siege, the most memorable in the annals of the 
 British Isles. It had lasted a hundred and five days. The garrison had 
 been reduced from about seven thousand effective men to about three 
 thousand. 
 
 All these propositions are right, are veracious, are good in 
 style, in so far as they are adequate to the speaker's thought 
 and perception of fact in the first two cases to the highly 
 charged and complex matter which Wordsworth and Shelley 
 sought to deliver, in the third to the definite issue which 
 Macaulay had to report. Criticism might question whether 
 the siege of Londonderry was really ' the most memorable 
 in the annals of the British Isles.' But criticism, knowing 
 Macaulay's view of English history, would have no right to 
 challenge his statement on the ground of style. Criticism 
 might object to Wordsworth's identification of Duty with 
 Cosmic Law, and to Shelley's pathetic sympathy with autumn 
 woodlands. But criticism, having seized each poet's point of 
 view, would have no right to challenge his statement on 
 the ground of style. In each case the verbal expression is 
 correspondent to the thing presented. 
 
 Precision being the main purpose of a writer, he will pay 
 minute attention to the grammar and logic of language, so 
 that there may be no obscurity, or incoherence in his method 
 of expression. With the same object he will study the 
 qualities of words, remembering that the right word used 
 in the right place constitutes the perfection of style. Words 
 will be weighed in their sonority, their colour-value, their 
 suggestiveness, their derivation and metaphysical usage. He 
 will show his taste by the avoidance of foreign vocables, 
 neologisms, obsolete terms, unless the rhetoric of his subject- 
 matter renders such verba insolentia helpful to the meaning. 
 To be meticulous (as Sir Thomas Browne would say), in the 
 adoption of new phrases or the resuscitation of old words 
 is hardly less reprehensible than to be reckless in the ill- 
 considered use of them. Justice of perception consists in 
 
 Q
 
 226 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 knowing how and when and where to deviate from the beaten 
 track ; and in nothing do writers of equal excellence reveal 
 their individual proclivities more plainly than in their selec- 
 tion of uncommon vocables or turns of phrase. 
 
 The art of style, like all arts of expression, does not aim 
 exclusively at precision. It is a fine art, and demands beauty 
 as the concomitant of truth. We have a sense for the beauty 
 of language in itself, just as we have a sense for the beauty of 
 sounds, colours, forms. This sense claims to be gratified by 
 harmonious and rhythmic utterance. Students of style will 
 therefore take pains to avoid unnecessary tautology, to vary 
 the openings and outlines of propositions, to alternate long 
 and short sentences, and to connect these into well-built para- 
 graphs. They will be sensible that, as every idea has its one 
 right verbal form, so every phrase ought to have its own dis- 
 tinctive cadence. Goethe used to say that each poetic motive 
 brought with it a rhythm and a stanza proper to itself ; and 
 this remark might be extended to the minutest particles of 
 thought conveyed in language. 
 
 Only slovenly writers who never felt the beauty of verbal 
 form, and brutal writers who do wilful violence to language, 
 ignore the duty of seeking the right phrase. Those for whom 
 style is an art will differ immeasurably in their power to use 
 it. The unknown painter struggling with a task beyond his 
 faculty cannot charm our senses with the suave and luminous 
 achievements of a Titian or Veronese. But even humble 
 workers are able to do much by love and care, toward lifting 
 their utterance above the dead level of commonplace. Let 
 them rewrite sentences, recast paragraphs, remould chapters, 
 seeking at every step a bettering of their best, a closer union 
 with the melody which penetrates the intellectual ear. Striving 
 thus, we become sensible of what is meant by art in style. 
 We grow more vigorous ; and when there comes some vital 
 thought to utter, the clothing words spring forth with more of 
 freshness, strength, and music. 
 
 The lucid exposition of ideas in ordered sequence, the 
 weaving of sentences into coherent paragraphs, the unfolding 
 of arguments by natural yet logically constructed steps, the
 
 THE ART OF STYLE 227 
 
 presentation of scenes and pictures by successions of con- 
 tributory images these operations of the literary craftsman 
 demand close attention to what is called transition. Style, it 
 has been said, consists in the art of transition : that is, the art 
 of moving easily and convincingly from point to point, 
 supplying the needful ' connective tissue ' of language without 
 clumsiness and without the obtrusive pedantry of scholastic 
 distinctions. Nor let it be imagined that this is a mere 
 matter of stylistic grace. The art of transition and connection 
 has quite as much to do with veracity of thought as with 
 elegance of expression. It was upon this art, as the one thing 
 needful to sound rhetoric, that Socrates discoursed in his 
 golden way to Phsedrus on the banks of the Ilissus. This is 
 what Buffon meant by the words which so impressed Gustave 
 Flaubert : ' Toutes les beautes intellectuelles qui se trouvent 
 dans un beau style, tous les rapports dont il est compost, sont 
 autant de v6rites aussi utiles, et peut-etre plus precieuses pour 
 1'esprit public, que celles qui peuvent faire le fond du sujet.' 
 
 II 
 
 While bestowing minute attention on the niceties of lan- 
 guage, young writers should bear in mind that no rules of 
 composition, no rhetoric which professes to teach the art of 
 treating subjects appropriately, can supply the two requisites 
 of a good style vigorous and well-digested thought, which 
 constitutes its matter ; and pure idiomatic diction, which 
 constitutes its crowning grace of form. 
 
 ' Authors,' said De Quincey, in his unfinished essay on 
 Style, ' have always been a dangerous class for any language.' 
 They have been dangerous because they are liable to sub- 
 stitute sophistry and declamation for solid thinking, and 
 because the habit of writing books alienates their language from 
 the vivacity of the vernacular and the raciness of spoken idiom. 
 
 Few men of letters nowadays would dare to follow Swift 
 and Sterne, those classics of our prose, in their bold use of 
 colloquialisms. Goethe prided himself on 'having never 
 thought much about thinking.' We might argue in favour 
 
 Q'2
 
 228 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 of not thinking overmuch about writing. A fastidious avoid- 
 ance of what is plain and common may lead us insensibly into 
 the worst of all faults affectation and stylistic pedantry ; 
 may blind us to the fact that what we say is more important 
 than how we say it, and that the first condition of good 
 writing is strong feeling and clear thinking. 
 
 Englishmen, however, incline toward carelessness rather 
 than scrupulousness in the matter of language. It will be 
 long before our journalists and novelists deserve the reproach 
 which George Sand is said to have addressed to Flaubert, and 
 which, in my opinion, Flaubert, that martyr to verbal nicety, 
 deserved : ' You regard expression as an end in itself ; it is 
 but an effect.' 
 
 The purity of idiom in English literature runs its chief risks 
 from bookish phrases, from misapplied terms like 'predica- 
 ment' and 'category,' from nouns in 'ist' and 'ism' 
 (' scientist,' ' educationalist,' ' evolutionism '), from evil 
 metaphors involved in verbs like ' to avail oneself of,' from 
 hackneyed forms of artificial sentences, which save the writer 
 trouble and blind him to the duty of saying freshly what he 
 thinks and feels. From the great curse of German, the whole- 
 sale incorporation of foreign words into the language, we are 
 fortunately delivered by the genius of our mother speech. 
 We cannot construct endless ugly verbs in iren, or adopt 
 French vocables with mutilated terminations. Nor again is 
 it within the power of English writers to construct flaccid 
 sentences of between two hundred and three hundred words, 
 in which the attention of the reader is suspended till the close 
 falls on the separable particle of the leading verb. That is a 
 stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, which can be found 
 only in Germany. 
 
 De Quincey, in the essay already quoted from, inveighs 
 against ' the tumid and tumultuary structure of our sentences.' 
 He delivers his impeachment in the following period, which, 
 except that it is artfully conducted to a climax, might seem 
 designed to illustrate the fault he is attacking : 
 
 Ever since a more bookish air was impressed upon composition 
 without much effort by the Latinised and artificial phraseology, by
 
 THE AKT OF STYLE 229 
 
 forms of expression consecrated to books, and by long-tailed words in 
 osity and ation, either because writers felt that already, in this one act 
 of preference shown to the artificial vocabulary, they had done enough 
 to establish a differential character of regular composition, and on that 
 consideration thought themselves entitled to neglect the combination of 
 their words into sentences or periods ; or because there is a real natural 
 sympathy between the Latin phraseology and a Latin structure of 
 sentence ; certain it is and remarkable, that our popular style in the 
 common limited sense of arrangement applied to words or the syntax of 
 sentences, has laboured with two faults that might have been thought 
 incompatible ; it has been artificial, by artifices peculiarly adapted to the 
 powers of the Latin language, and yet at the very same time careless and 
 disordinate. 
 
 Every artist in style ought to be able to construct a period 
 like this. But he should be cautious in the exercise of his 
 power, reserving it for solemn and exceptional occasions. De 
 Quincey wrote before the days of Macaulay, the Saturday 
 Review, and Mr. Matthew Arnold. Whatever may be urged 
 against our average prose style now, it can no longer be called 
 'tumid and tumultuary.' From neither a good nor a bad 
 author of the present time would it be easy to extract a 
 sentence with as many inversions, parentheses, suspensions, 
 as many resounding Latin words, and an apodosis so long 
 suspended, as mark the example I have just quoted. Short 
 propositions and easy writing have become fashionable. 
 Simplicity of structure is even ostentatiously paraded. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Among means toward the acquisition of pure style, the 
 most important is ' industrious and select reading.' 
 
 When Ben Jonson, in the Poetaster, administered his purge 
 to Marston, he bade that crabbed writer break his fast upon 
 ' old Cato's principles,' then ' taste a piece of Terence, suck 
 his phrase instead of liquorice.' Plautus and Ennius among 
 the Romans were to be shunned as meat too crude for queasy 
 stomachs. So was Lycophron among the Greeks. But 
 Callimachus, Theocritus, and ' high Homer ' might be read 
 with profit. In the sixteenth century these were needful
 
 230 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 precepts. There were then few models of written style 
 except the ancients and some masterpieces of Italian. But 
 even in that limited field criticism exercised its judgment, 
 pointing out which authors were to be preferred because of 
 their lucidity. 
 
 The case is altered now. We have a rich and varied 
 modern literature to choose from. The first duty of a 
 student should be to make himself acquainted with the 
 classics of his own nation. This forms a copious vocabulary, 
 and fills the ear with native rhythms both in prose and verse. 
 Each language, however, has its specific strength and beauty. 
 Therefore it is desirable to study Greek and Latin for clear- 
 cut form in style, Italian for melodious flow, French for 
 limpidity and finish. By observing what is excellent in each 
 of these literatures, and in what points they differ from our 
 own, by translating passages from their great writers into 
 English, and considering how the genius of our tongue may 
 assimilate their graces, the novice gradually forms a style. 
 
 Although a man's style is the sign of his faculties, yet 
 he possesses the power of moulding it upon that of the 
 writers he prefers as George Sand moulded hers on 
 Rousseau, Mr. Buskin his on the Bible and Hooker, Mr. 
 B. L. Stevenson his on the multitude of authors whom it was 
 his habit, while a youth, assiduously to imitate. Nothing is 
 more disastrous than to take as model some illustrious artist 
 whose tricks are more easily assimilated than his excellences. 
 Lyly, through the vogue of Euphuism, injured English prose 
 in the seventeenth century, and Marino ruined the poetry of 
 the Italians. Johnson was noxious at the end of the last 
 century. Carlyle debased the standard of narrative and 
 critical diction in the second half of the nineteenth century. 
 Macaulay, in spite of his sterling merit, is accountable for 
 much that is flashy and short-winded in contemporary style. 
 
 The control exercised by famous authors over the forms 
 of national literature through successive centuries is one of 
 the most curious aspects of the present inquiry. We have 
 only to think of the influence of Cicero and Virgil over Latin 
 prose and poetry ; of Boccaccio and Petrarch over Italian.
 
 THE ART OF STYLE 231 
 
 Men are in all ways more imitative than we usually allow. 
 This might be further illustrated by the predominance of 
 fashion at certain epochs. It became the custom among us 
 in England, about the middle of the seventeenth century, to 
 write with eyes fixed steadily on France as the exponent of 
 the classical tradition. During the last hundred years we 
 have been writing in conscious and admiring sympathy with 
 our Elizabethan ancestors. After allowance has been made 
 for divergence from the models fashionable at each of these 
 epochs divergences due in the one case to national genius, 
 and in the other to historical and social changes within the 
 English people the specific notes of the two periods in our 
 literature may be roughly explained by reference respectively 
 to dominance of French and Elizabethan fashion. 1 
 
 IV 
 
 Style, as we have seen, is a twofold phenomenon, involving 
 both the genius of nations exemplified in language, and 
 the genius of individuals who use the language. Thus 
 considered, the art of style consists, for each person, in the 
 method of employing his faculties of thought and feeling, 
 and his command of any given language, to the best 
 advantage. 
 
 But style also varies with the nature of the subject-matter, 
 the state of the writer's mind at any given moment, and the 
 end to be attained by utterance. The style of poetry differs 
 essentially from that of prose ; and neglect of this fact leads 
 to hybrid composition, which offends the purest taste. 
 Poetical prose and word-painting are common with those 
 writers who have not made up their minds in what direction 
 their powers lie who would fain be poets, and yet choose 
 the seemingly more facile vehicle of prose to utter their 
 emotions. 
 
 'That is good rhetoric for the hustings which is bad for 
 a book,' said De Quincey. ' In the senate, and for the same 
 
 1 I hope to pursue this subject further in an essay on ' Elizabethan 
 and Victorian Poetry.'
 
 232 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 reason in a newspaper, it is good to reiterate your meaning.' 
 The orator has to repeat his arguments, and to place the 
 same points in new lights, lest their force should escape 
 the fugitive attention of an audience. It would be imperti- 
 nent in the writer of a book to claim the privileges of 
 a public speaker. His readers are able to perpend his 
 sentences, to pause and ponder, to resume the chain of 
 reasoning by casting their eyes backward over the pages they 
 have traversed. Yet, even in books, some subjects demand 
 a more oratorical method of treatment than others. When 
 it is the writer's aim to persuade his readers, to carry them 
 gently along with him, to infiltrate their minds with unfamiliar 
 or difficult ideas, he may indulge in repetition. This made the 
 style of J. S. Mill effective. But it also rendered that style 
 deceptive by its very lucidity, hiding the thinness of some 
 thoughts which were presented under aspects so agreeably 
 varied. 
 
 That is good rhetoric for the pulpit which is bad for the 
 bar ; and conversely a forensic style is intolerable within the 
 precincts of a church. Lord Brougham was right to study 
 Demosthenes ; but Bossuet, and South, and Newman are 
 proper models for a canon of S. Paul's. The reason is 
 apparent. On the hustings, in the senate, before juries, in 
 the pulpit, men appeal to different passions and emotions : 
 they are not only dealing with different orders of ideas, but 
 are attempting to impress different sensibilities, and to 
 influence the reason by different kinds of argument. The 
 mood of the speaker differs in each case ; he feels a different 
 stimulus and draws his inspiration from different sources. 
 The same man is frequently a first-rate preacher and a 
 powerful platform orator ; he may also be an excellent 
 parliamentary speaker. But the change of attitude implied 
 in each of these positions necessitates an alteration in his 
 style. The personality of Mr. Gladstone, the character of 
 the individual moulding his manner of expression, appears 
 alike in that great rhetorician's books, letters, lay-sermons, 
 speeches to the House, and addresses to Midlothian monster 
 meetings. They display common Dualities of eloquence and
 
 THE ART OF STYLE 233 
 
 casuistical subtlety, combined with imperfect powers of 
 criticism ; but these are variously, if slightly, modified 
 according to the matter and the mode of presentation. 
 
 Within the stricter limits of writing the same rhetorical 
 principles hold good. If a man of science sits down to pen 
 a treatise which will be read by experts in the libraries, and 
 discussed in the learned societies of Europe, he confines 
 himself to exact statement and the lucid order of marshalled 
 arguments. If he desires to popularise the same ideas, he 
 abounds in illustrations and elucidations, introducing matter 
 which would have been irrelevant in the handling of his 
 theme for scientific students. 
 
 History, fiction, biography, albeit they are three species of 
 prose narrative, demand different styles. It is indeed possible 
 to lend the glamour of romance to history, as Michelet did in 
 his ' Histoire de France,' or to treat it from the biographical 
 point of view, as Carlyle did his ' Frederick.' Yet history 
 cannot be mistaken for deliberate fiction or for pure biography. 
 Fiction, in like manner, may be composed upon the lines of 
 history or biography ; but in so far as it assumes the gravity 
 of the one or the veracity of the other, it fails to communicate 
 the impressions we expect from romance. This is proved 
 sufficiently by current language. We say that the sixth and 
 seventh books of Thucydides are as engrossing as any novel, 
 that the last three books of Herodotus have the movement of 
 a drama, that the incidents of Cellini's autobiography surpass 
 the boldest inventions of an imaginative writer. That means 
 that we look for certain qualities in fiction of which we are 
 now and then reminded in the lives of men or the episodes of 
 national story. Biography, again, can be written from the 
 point of view of fiction that was common enough in past 
 ages ; or from the point of view of history that is a favourite 
 practice nowadays. But whether we regard Plutarch's ' Lives ' 
 and Machiavelli's ' Castruccio Castracane,' which represent 
 the one method, or the many ' Lives and Times ' of eminent 
 persons which are fashionable at the present date, it is obvious 
 in each case that the writers were aiming at what should pass 
 for full-length portraits of individuals. Biography differs from
 
 234 NOTES OX STYLE 
 
 fiction, since it appeals to the sense of veracity, and does 
 not seek to create illusion ; from history, since it discards 
 details which will not throw the central figure into high 
 relief. 
 
 Within the sphere of dramatic poetry, it is clear that tragedy, 
 comedy, melodrama, farce, owing to their different tone and 
 subject-matter, require different arts of rhetoric. You cannot 
 write an idyll in the same manner as a satire, or pronounce 
 the panegyric of a deceased emperor in the style appropriate 
 to a discourse on bees. The choice of vehicle in each of these 
 cases may be the same. Prose may be used for every species 
 of the drama. Idylls, satires, panegyrics, didactic poems, 
 may be composed in the same metre hexameters, or heroic 
 couplets, or blank verse. Yet the matter to be handled 
 and the mental attitude of the writer while handling it, 
 necessitate unmistakable differences of literary mood and 
 form. 
 
 These are truisms with which every student is familiar. 
 The excuse for repeating them is twofold. In the first place 
 we have to insist upon the indissoluble nexus between thought 
 and language, whereby a change in the writer's mental atti- 
 tude, a change in his mental material, induces a correspond- 
 ing quality of differentiated style. In the second place they 
 enable us to point out a further sense in which style may 
 be regarded as an art to be acquired by practice through the 
 study of acknowledged masterpieces in each of the branches 
 of literature. 
 
 A man's own style will to a large extent be made or marred 
 by the masters under whose influence he falls, or by the 
 impress of a prevalent ideal. If this were not so, we should 
 be unable to trace the tradition of Virgilian style in Latin 
 literature, or to define the predominance of Boccaccio in the 
 literature of the Italian Renaissance. We could not discuss 
 the characteristics of a given epoch or the manner of a well- 
 marked school : by which terms we are wont to indicate the 
 co-operative action of gregarious writers and their liability to 
 imitation. A deeper meaning might be given to these aspects 
 of transmitted style. But this is not the place to entertain
 
 THE ART OF STYLE 235 
 
 speculative questions which have been already discussed in a 
 former essay. 1 
 
 For the present, it is enough to point out that a writer, 
 having developed his command of language, improved his 
 taste by reading, and discovered the compass of his organ of 
 expression, seeks further instruction when he wishes to apply 
 his power of style to any special form of prose or poetry. If 
 he is ambitious to compose an epic, he will inquire how 
 Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Milton, set about their task ; 
 or the taste of his age may direct him to the Scandinavian 
 Sagas, the Nibelungen, the Song of Eoland, and the ' Morte 
 d' Arthur.' If he is an orator, he will consult Demosthenes, 
 Cicero, Burke, Bossuet. If his bent be toward tragedy, he 
 will meditate the Attic and Elizabethan dramatists, the French 
 classics, Goethe and Schiller. If he attempts satire, he will 
 see what Archiloehus and Aristophanes, Juvenal and Persius, 
 Rabelais and Eegnier, Cervantes and Swift, Dryden and Pope, 
 Heine and Victor Hugo, have done before him. If history 
 attract his genius, Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and 
 Tacitus, Machiavelli and Michelet, Gibbon and Macaulay, 
 Von Eanke and Mommsen, claim his attention. And so 
 forth through the whole long list of literary species. 
 
 We cannot, in the present conditions of culture, affirm 
 that any monuments of art are absolutely authoritative. The 
 choice is large. The canons of criticism are liberal. The 
 instincts of the individual, whether at variance with the 
 general tendency of his age, or submissive to its influence, 
 will determine his selection of a model. Still, it is certain 
 that some model, whether deliberately chosen or passively 
 assimilated, exercises a control over the writer's manner. If 
 the art of style could be reduced to a fixed science, then 
 certain masterpieces in each branch of literature would have 
 to be recognised as indisputable standards, and production 
 would cease or merge in imitation. But the intellectual bias 
 of the century forbids such a relapse into the pedantry of 
 classicism. Taste, therefore, and the rules of comparative 
 
 1 See above, Essay No. 2, on the Application of Evolutionary Prin- 
 ciples to Art and Literature.
 
 236 NOTES ON STYLE 
 
 study under which we work now, force the artist to reflect 
 upon the various creations of numerous predecessors in any 
 field which he has undertaken. And thus the great monu- 
 ments of past ages are continually moulding and impressing 
 the style of the present, crossing and recrossing, blending 
 their influences. Ever more and more, the literature of the 
 Occidental races tends to become a complicated mass of 
 hybrids.
 
 DEMOCRATIC AET 
 WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WALT WHITMAN 
 
 DURING the first half of this century, the rival merits of 
 classical and romantic art were stormily debated. There is 
 no need to revive that discussion. People of sense now 
 recognise the truth that in whatever style an artist works, 
 the style will be classical, provided the work itself be good, 
 sincere, and representative of sterling thought. Yet a few 
 words have to be said about this bygone phase of European 
 criticism, since it forms a necessary prelude to the treatment 
 of Democratic Art. 
 
 The romantic revolt against those canons of taste which 
 prevailed in Europe after the Revival of Learning, was in 
 some respects analogous to the insurgence of realism against 
 idealism. It took its origin in a desire for free and spon- 
 taneous artistic form. It started from the conviction that 
 there was something radically insincere in the orthodox rules 
 regarding dignity of sentiment, sustained diction, and heroic 
 action. The study of mediaeval antiquities, the revived 
 enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and the powerful impact of the 
 German mind aroused from its long lethargy, provoked a 
 reaction against humanistic traditions, which acquired revo- 
 lutionary force in France. Romantic poets, novelists, and 
 painters declared their abhorrence of the conventional ' grand 
 style.' They sought inspiration from hitherto neglected 
 masterpieces of the Middle Ages. They delighted in the 
 crudest aspects of human life and nature. To be striking,
 
 238 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 vivid, passionate, and grotesque was their main object. Pro- 
 portion and harmony gave place to wayward incoherence. 
 The gutter, the hospital, the galleys were ransacked for 
 examples of pathos and nobility. Witches and vampires 
 superseded the Pantheon of Olympus. Murder, rape, suicide, 
 disgust of life in love-lorn youths and maidens, formed the 
 motive principles of wild unhealthy fiction. It was a time 
 of spasms and contortions, of Sturm und Drang and Welt- 
 schmerz ; of Goethe's Werther, De Musset's JRolla, Byron's 
 Manfred, Heine's Eatcliffe, Schiller's Bobbers. Sense and 
 stateliness, the precepts of Boileau, Voltaire's pellucid irony, 
 Pope's correction, Lessing's moderation, were assailed with 
 ridicule and sarcasm. The great but essentially imperfect 
 work of men like Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, testified 
 to the vitality of this reactionary movement. It found a 
 prose Shakespeare in Balzac, and produced a monumental 
 masterpiece in Goethe's Faust. 
 
 Meanwhile a thorough-going emancipation of taste and 
 judgment had been effected. The freedom for which the 
 earlier romanticists had fought was gained. New forms of 
 expression and new standards of artistic excellence prevailed. 
 Pseudo-classical insincerity and hollowness were purged away ; 
 and it became apparent that romanticism, in its turn, was not 
 devoid of pedantry. The main result of this romantic revolu- 
 tion was the discovery that no subject in human history or 
 life, no object in the eternal world of nature, is unpoetical 
 or unfitted for artistic treatment. At the same time, all 
 methods of handling, all ways of seizing and presenting the 
 material of art, obtained an equal right to exist. At the end 
 of the conflict, criticism only demanded that style should 
 realise the end proposed by the artist, that workmanship 
 should be honest, the craftsman conscientious, and the pro- 
 duct faithful to the concept. 
 
 This in itself was a great gain. Yet if this had been all, 
 the prospect for the future would not have been cheering. 
 As their names imply, both classicism and romanticism were 
 derivative and not spontaneous ways of conceiving the art 
 problem. The classical schools of modern times rehandled
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 239 
 
 material and observed rules supplied from Greece and Rome 
 through scholarship. The romantic schools reverted to the 
 literature and the architecture of feudalism. Classicism was 
 essentially aristocratic. Romanticism was revolutionary ; but 
 it drew its inspiration from sources no less aristocratic. 
 Neither mode possessed finality, because neither corresponded 
 to the cardinal phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which 
 is the advent of the people. The point to which we have 
 been brought by their conflict in the sphere of art and letters 
 is that a new mode of utterance, which may be termed the 
 Democratic, has been rendered possible. The shams of the 
 classicists, the spasms of the romanticists, have alike to be 
 abandoned. Neither on a mock Parnassus nor on a paste- 
 board Blocksberg can the poets of the age now worship. The 
 artist walks the world at large beneath the light of natural 
 day. Despising nothing which the past can teach, rejecting 
 nothing which the present offers, he aims at manifesting what 
 he finds of beautiful and striking in the outer and the inner 
 worlds : secure the while that if he feels sincerely and labours 
 conscientiously, his work will be of sterling value, no matter 
 what the style may be or what kind of subject has attracted 
 him. 
 
 II 
 
 This, speaking broadly, is the initial condition of Demo- 
 cratic Art : an art free in its choice of style, free in its choice 
 of subject ; an art which has recovered sobriety after the 
 delirium of romantic revolution ; but which retains from that 
 reactionary movement one precious principle that nothing in 
 nature or in man is unpoetical, if treated by a mind which 
 feels its poetry and can interpret it. 
 
 This however, is only the beginning, the attitude, the 
 opportunity of Democratic Art. There remains a graver 
 question to be considered. How shall the poet and the artist 
 adjust themselves to what I have called the cardinal fact of 
 our epoch, to the advent of the people ? Classical and feudal 
 art were essentially aristocratic. Modern classicism and 
 romanticism were in a derivative sense aristocratic also. The
 
 240 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 latter, it is true, brought certain aspects of the people into 
 prominence. But it did so hysterically, in a spirit of revolt, 
 without clear intelligence of the altered political and social 
 conditions to which serious art must henceforth respond. 
 
 Under these conditions an art for the people, of the people, 
 seems imperatively demanded, unless art, including literature, 
 shall relax its hold upon reality and subside into agreeable 
 trifling. 
 
 Up to the present moment there are but few signs of any 
 vital resurrection of the spirit. Not only in Europe, but in 
 America also, culture continues to be mainly reproductive 
 and imitative. The conflict of romanticism with classicism 
 liberated taste ; yet artists still handle worn-out themes in 
 the old formal ways, without the earlier grasp upon them, 
 without fervour of conviction, and without power to awake 
 popular enthusiasm. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So far as I am aware, only one living author has approached 
 this problem with a full sense of its present urgency and 
 ultimate preponderance. I allude to Walt Whitman, whose 
 whole life has been employed in attempting to lay foundations 
 for a new national literature. Whatever we may think about 
 Whitman's actual performance, it is impossible to neglect his 
 teaching or his practice, when we entertain the question of 
 Democratic Art. For this reason I propose to examine what 
 he has written directly and indirectly upon the topic. 
 
 A short but pregnant essay, entitled ' Democratic Vistas, 
 contains the pith of Whitman's theoretical opinions. It 
 starts with a declaration of the author's intention to use ' the 
 words America and Democracy ' as ' convertible terms.' 
 ' The United States,' he says, ' are destined to surmount the 
 gorgeous history of Feudalism, or else prove the most tremen- 
 dous failure of time.' Whitman points out that while 
 America advances rapidly to a dominant position in wealth 
 and strength and all material qualities of national greatness, 
 a literature corresponding to that modern Democracy with 
 which she is identified, has not as yet appeared. ' Feudalism,
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 241 
 
 caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating 
 from political institutions, still hold essentially by their spirit, 
 even in this country, entire possession of the most important 
 fields, indeed the very subsoil of education and of social 
 standards and literature.' From this proposition he advances 
 to the assertion that 'Democracy can never prove itself 
 beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own 
 forms of arts, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that 
 exists or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under 
 opposite influences.' 
 
 The claims here advanced for the art demanded by America 
 and Democracy are perhaps excessive. Yet Walt Whitman 
 has to be attended to when he writes upon this subject. 'He 
 is Democracy,' said Thoreau, speaking of him. And his 
 opinions, although audacious in the extreme, are those of a 
 powerful thinker as well as a sagacious observer. 
 
 In the Old World we shall possibly find them only in part 
 valuable ; since they are specially uttered for the instruction 
 of the United States. England, France, Spain, Germany, 
 Italy, cannot be expected to break with their historical tra- 
 ditions, and to discard all ' that has been produced anywhere 
 in the past, under opposite conditions.' Whatever may be 
 the triumph of Democracy in Europe, this is requiring too 
 much of nations born in the purple, and adorned with so 
 many illustrious monuments of ancestral genius. It may 
 also be doubted whether Whitman is wise in exhorting the 
 miscellaneous population of North America to found a new 
 culture which shall ' displace all that exists.' 
 
 The mental progress of humanity is not effected by abrupt 
 divisions and sudden dislocations. Every process of change 
 implies absorption, blending, compromise, recombination. As 
 in the case of a glacier, if movement implies fracture, it also 
 involves regelation. The spirit of an age or race yields to 
 that of its successor, but abides within it still as an essential 
 ingredient assumed, transformed, and carried forward. 
 Modern forces evolve themselves inside the sphere of men and 
 manners, which have been shaped by influences derived from 
 remote antiquity. We are the complex outcome of a tenfold 
 
 B
 
 242 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 mingled ancestry, not any portion of which has been, or can 
 be, absolutely cast aside. To escape the fatality of hereditary 
 transmission is hopeless. No individual man can be wholly 
 original, in the sense of being independent of his progenitors 
 and predecessors. Far more impossible is it for whole nations 
 to fling themselves adrift from their moorings, or to construct 
 an ideal world of culture corresponding to temporary con- 
 ditions however urgent and imposing. The advent of the 
 people, paramount as it is in the experience of the nineteenth 
 century, will not revolutionise the laws which govern human 
 society. Language, the instrument of thought and the 
 vehicle of utterance, remains an uncontrollable witness to the 
 dependence of the present on the past. No one has been so 
 insane as to pretend that odes and epics could be written in 
 Volapiik. 1 
 
 After making these deductions, Whitman's claim for a new 
 start in culture deserves serious consideration. Democracy is 
 a fact, the main fact, I repeat it, of our epoch. It is more than 
 a political phenomenon. It contains the germ of a religious 
 enthusiasm. If the modern world is destined to be remodelled 
 by Democracy and in some form or other this must happen 
 then what is applicable to America will in a large measure 
 
 1 Whitman himself seems willing to concede the point on which I have 
 insisted in this paragraph. He says, in an article on the ' Poetry of the 
 Future ' (North American Review, February, 1881 why not included in 
 his ' November Boughs,' I know not) : ' I see that this world of the 
 West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all, as time 
 does the ever new, yet old, old human race " the same subject continued," 
 as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not 
 to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilisa- 
 tions, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what 
 on earth are we for ? ' That is common sense. Here Whitman puts his 
 position with regard to the innovatory and superseding destiny of the 
 United States in a reasonable light. Wishing to do him justice, I have 
 quoted the passage ; although I am not aware that he has republished 
 the article in which it occurs. It may appear in one of the many collec- 
 tions of his works in prose and verse with which I am unacquainted. At 
 any rate, the essay ought to be read by students of Whitman, for it is 
 full of fine things.
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 243 
 
 apply to Europe also. We need not accept the postulate that 
 Democracy must prove itself beyond cavil by creating intel- 
 lectual types which shall displace all that previously existed. 
 But we may believe that Democracy will and ought to produce 
 arts and a literature differing in essential points from those 
 of classical antiquity and romantic feudalism. We may admit 
 that Graeco-Eoman and medieval ideals are inadequate to the 
 modern, democratic, scientific stage upon which humanity has 
 definitely entered. We may even be so sanguine as to hope 
 that this new phase of development contains an ideality of its 
 own, capable of contributing hitherto unapprehended sources 
 of inspiration to the artist. 
 
 This is the problem offered to investigation in my present 
 essay. I wish to consider it mainly from the point of view 
 furnished by Whitman's writings. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are two aspects under which the problem of Demo- 
 cratic Art must be regarded. In the first place we have to 
 ask what sort of art, including literature under this title, 
 Democracy requires. To this question Whitman, in his 
 ' Democratic Vistas,' gives an answer : turbid in expression, 
 far from lucid, but pregnant with sympathetic intelligence of 
 the main issues. In the second place we have to ask what 
 elements are furnished to the artist by the people, which have 
 not already been worked out in the classical and feudal forms 
 and their derivatives. Whitman attempts to supply us with 
 an answer to this second question also, not in his speculative 
 essays, but in the mass of imaginative compositions which he 
 designates by the name of poems or notes for poems. His 
 report upon both topics may be postponed for the moment, 
 while we revert to the revolution effected by the romantic 
 movement of a hundred years ago. It behoves us to review 
 the clearance of obsolete obstructions, and to survey the new 
 ground gained, whereon our hopes are founded of a future 
 reconstruction. 
 
 Delivered from scholastic traditions regarding style and 
 
 B2
 
 244 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 the right subjects to be handled delivered from pedantry and 
 blind reactionary fervour delivered from dependence upon 
 aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority sharing the emanci- 
 pation of the intellect by modern science and the enfranchise- 
 ment of the individual by new political conceptions the 
 artist is brought immediately face to face with the wonderful 
 world of men and things he has to interpret and to recreate. 
 The whole of nature, seen for the first time with sane eyes, 
 the whole of humanity, liberated for the first time from caste 
 and class distinctions, invite his sympathy. Now dawns upon 
 his mind the beauty, the divinity, which lies enfolded in the 
 simplest folk, the commonest objects presented to his senses. 
 He perceives the dignity of humble occupations, the grace inhe- 
 rent in each kind of labour well performed. He discovers that 
 love is a deity in the cottage no less than in king's chambers ; 
 not with the supercilious condescension of Tasso's ' Aminta ' 
 or Guarini's ' Pastor Fido,' but with a reverent recognition of 
 the prasens deus in the heart of every man and woman. In 
 order to make Florizel and Perdita charming, it is no longer 
 necessary that they should be prince and princess in disguise ; 
 nor need the tale of ' Daphnis and Chloe ' now be written 
 with that lame conclusion of lost children restored to wealthy 
 high-born parents. Heroism steps forth from the tent of 
 Achilles ; chivalry descends from the arm-gaunt charger of 
 the knight ; loyalty is seen to be no mere devotion to a 
 dynasty; passionate friendship quits the brotherhood of 
 Pylades and the dear embraces of Peirithous. None of these 
 high virtues are lost to us. On the contrary, we find them 
 everywhere. They are brought within reach, instead of being 
 relegated to some remote region in the past, or deemed the 
 special property of privileged classes. The engine-driver 
 steering his train at night over perilous viaducts, the life-boat 
 man, the member of a fire-brigade assailing houses toppling 
 to their ruin among flames ; these are found to be no less 
 heroic than Theseus grappling the Minotaur in Cretan 
 labyrinths. And so it is with the chivalrous respect for 
 womanhood and weakness, with loyal self-dedication to a 
 principle or cause, with comradeship uniting men in brother-
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 246 
 
 hood, with passion fit for tragedy, with beauty shedding light 
 from heaven on human habitations. They were thought to 
 dwell far off in antique fable or dim mediaeval legend. They 
 appeared to our fancy clad in glittering armour, plumed and 
 spurred, surrounded with the aureole of noble birth. We 
 now behold them at our house-doors, in the streets and fields 
 around us. Conversely, our eyes are no longer shut to the 
 sordidness and baseness which royal palaces and princely 
 hearts may harbour to the meanness of the Court of the 
 Valois, to the vulgarity of the Court of Charles II., to the vile 
 tone of a Prince Kegent, to the dishonour, dishonesty, and 
 disloyalty toward women which have always, more or less, 
 prevailed in so-called good society. 
 
 This extended recognition of the noble and the lovely 
 qualities in human life, the qualities upon which pure art must 
 seize, is due partially to what we call democracy. But it 
 implies something more than that word is commonly supposed 
 to denote a new and more deeply religious way of looking 
 at mankind, a gradual triumph after so many centuries of the 
 spirit which is Christ's, an enlarged faculty for piercing below 
 externals and appearances to the truth and essence of things. 
 God, the divine, is recognised as immanent in nature, and in 
 the soul and body of humanity ; not external to these things, 
 not conceived of as creative from outside, or as incarnated 
 in any single personage, but as all-pervasive, all-constitutive, 
 everywhere and in all. That is the democratic philosophy ; 
 and science has contributed in no small measure to pro- 
 duce it. 
 
 Meanwhile, we need not preach the abandonment of high 
 time-honoured themes. Why should we seek to break the 
 links which bind us to the best of that far past from which 
 we came ? Achilles has not ceased to be a fit subject for 
 poem or statue because we discern heroism in an engine- 
 driver. Lovely knights and Flora Macdonald, Peirithous 
 and Pylades, King Cophetua and Burd Helen, abide with all 
 the lustre of their strength, and grace, and charm. They 
 have lost nothing because others have gained because we 
 now acknowledge that the chivalry, the loyalty, the comrade-
 
 246 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 ship, the love, the pathos, which made their stories admirable, 
 are shared by living men and women, whose names have not 
 been sounded through fame's silver trumpet. 
 
 I have hitherto touched but lightly upon the extension of 
 the sphere of beauty which may be expected from Democratic 
 Art. Through it we shall be led to discover the infinite 
 varieties of lovely form which belong peculiarly to the people. 
 Caste and high birth have no monopoly of physical come- 
 liness. It may even be maintained that social conditions 
 render it impossible for them to display more than a some- 
 what limited range of beauty. Goethe, I think, defined good 
 society as that which furnished no material for poetry. We 
 might apply this paradox to plastic art, and say that polished 
 gentlemen and ladies do not furnish the best materials for 
 sculpture and painting. How hardly shall they who wear 
 evening clothes and ball-dresses enter into the kingdom of 
 art ! There is a characteristic beauty in each several kind of 
 diurnal service, which waits to be elucidated. The superb 
 poise of the mower, as he swings his scythe ; the muscles of 
 the blacksmith, bent for an unerring stroke upon the anvil ; 
 the bowed form of the reaper, with belt tightened round his 
 loins ; the thresher's arm uplifted, while he swings the flail ; 
 the elasticity of oarsmen rising from their strain against the 
 wave ; the jockey's grip across his saddle ; the mountaineer's 
 slow, swinging stride ; the girl at the spinning-wheel, or 
 carrying the water-bucket on her head, or hanging linen 
 on the line, or busied with her china-closet : in each and 
 every motive of this kind and the list might be indefinitely 
 prolonged, for all trades and occupations have some distin- 
 guishing peculiarity there appears a specific note of grace 
 inalienable from the work performed. The artists of previous 
 ages did not wholly neglect this truth. Indeed, they were 
 eager to avail themselves of picturesque suggestions on the 
 lines here indicated. Yet they used these motives mainly 
 as adjuncts to themes of greater moment, and subordinated 
 them to what was deemed some loftier subject. Consequently, 
 these aspects of life did not receive the attention they 
 deserve; and the stores of beauty inherent in human
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 247 
 
 industries have been only partially developed. It is the 
 business of Democratic Art to unfold them fully. The time 
 has come when the noble and beautiful qualities of the people 
 demand a prominent place among worthy artistic motives. 
 
 An arduous task lies before the arts, if they are to bring 
 themselves into proper relation with the people ; not, as is 
 vulgarly supposed, because the people will debase their 
 standard, but because it will be hard for them to express the 
 real dignity, and to satisfy the keen perceptions and the pure 
 taste of the people. 
 
 There is a danger lest the solution of this problem should 
 suffer from being approached too consciously. What we want 
 is simplicity, emotional directness, open-mindedness, intelligent 
 sympathy, keen and yet reverent curiosity, the scientific com- 
 bined with the religious attitude toward fact. It will not do 
 to be doctrinaire or didactic. Patronage and condescension 
 are the worst of evils here. The spirit of Count Tolstoi, if 
 that could descend in some new Pentecost, would prepare the 
 world for Democratic Art. 
 
 Above all things, the middle-class conception of life must 
 be transcended. Decency, comfort, sobriety, maintenance of 
 appearances, gradual progression up a social ladder which is 
 scaled by tenths of inches, the chapel or the church, the gig 
 or the barouche, the growing balance at one's banker's, the 
 addition of esquire to our name or of a red rosette to our 
 button-hole, the firm resolve to keep well abreast with next- 
 door neighbours, if not ahead of them, in business and respect- 
 ability all these things, which characterise the middle-class 
 man wherever he appears, are good in their way. It were 
 well that the people should incorporate these virtues. But 
 there are corresponding defects in the bourgeoisie which have 
 to be steadily rejected an unwillingness to fraternise, an 
 incapacity for comradeship, a habit of looking down on so- 
 called inferiors, a contempt for hand-labour, a confusion of 
 morality with prejudice and formula, a tendency to stifle 
 religion in the gas of dogmas and dissenting shibboleths, an 
 obstinate insensibility to ideas. Snobbery and Pharisaism, 
 in one form or another, taint the middle-class to its core.
 
 248 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 Self-righteousness, and personal egotism, and ostrich-fear 
 corrode it. We need to deliver our souls from these 
 besetting sins, and to rise above them into more ethereal 
 atmosphere. The man of letters, the artist, who -would fain 
 prove himself adequate to Democracy in its noblest sense, 
 must emerge from earthy vapours of complacent self, and 
 artificial circumstances, and decaying feudalism. It is his 
 privilege to be free, and to represent freedom. It is his 
 function to find a voice, a mode of utterance, an ideal of form, 
 which shall be on a par with nature delivered from unscientific 
 canons of interpretation, and with mankind delivered from 
 obsolescent class distinctions. 
 
 Whitman offers enormous difficulties to the critic who 
 wishes to deal fairly with him. The grotesqueness of his 
 language and the uncouth structure of his sentences render 
 it almost impossible to do justice to the breadth of his 
 thought and the sublimity of his imagination. He ought 
 to be taken in large draughts, to be lived with in long 
 solitudes. His peculiar mode of utterance suffers cruelly by 
 quotation. Yet it is needful to extract his very words, in 
 order to escape from the vagueness of a summary. 
 
 The inscription placed upon the forefront of ' Leaves of 
 Grass ' contains this phrase : ' I speak the word of the modern, 
 the word EN-MASSE.' What this word means for Whitman is 
 expressed at large throughout his writings. We might throw 
 light upon it from the following passage : l 
 
 I speak the pass-word primeval I give the sign of democracy ; 
 By God ! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart 
 of on the same terms. 
 
 Thus Democracy implies the absolute equality of heritage 
 possessed by every man and woman in the good and evil of 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, 24. I quote from the New York edition of 1867, 
 being unable to follow the changes in subsequent re-issues of Whitman's 
 works.
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 249 
 
 this life. It also involves the conception that there is nothing 
 beautiful or noble which may not be discovered in the simplest 
 human being. As regards physical structure : l 
 
 Whoever you are! how superb and how divine is your body, or any 
 part of it. 
 
 As regards emotion and passions which throb and pulsate 
 in the individual : 2 
 
 Wherever the human heart beats with terrible throes out of its ribs. 
 
 ' Whoever ' and ' wherever ' are the emphatic words in 
 these quotations. The human body in itself is august ; the 
 heart has tragedy implicit in its life-beats. It does not 
 signify whose body, or whose heart. Here, there, and every- 
 where, the seeing eye finds majesty, the sentient intelligence 
 detects the stuff of drama. 
 
 The same principle is applied to the whole sphere of nature. 
 Miracles need not be sought in special occurrences, in pheno- 
 mena which startle us out of our ordinary way of regarding 
 the universe : 3 
 
 To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
 
 Every inch of space is a miracle, 
 
 Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 
 
 Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same ; 
 
 Every spear of grass the frames, limbs, organs of men and women, and 
 
 all that concern them, 
 All these to me are unspeakable miracles. 
 
 At this point science shakes hands with the democratic ideal. 
 We are not forced to gaze upon the starry heavens, or to 
 shudder at islands overwhelmed by volcanic throes, in order 
 to spy out the marvellous. Wonders are always present in 
 the material world, as in the spiritual : 4 
 
 A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics 
 of books. 
 
 1 ' Starting from Paumanok,' 14. - Walt Whitman, 33. 
 
 3 ' Miracles.' 4 Walt Whitman, 154.
 
 250 DEMOCRATIC AET 
 
 The heroic lies within our reach, if we but stretch a finger 
 forth to touch it : l 
 
 Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than 
 
 the Gods of the antique wars ; 
 
 Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, 
 Their brawny limbs passing safe over charred laths their white fore- 
 heads whole and unhurt out of the flames. 
 
 Whitman expels miracles from the region of mysticism, only 
 to find a deeper mysticism in the world of which he forms 
 a part, and miracles in commonplace occurrences. He de- 
 thrones the gods of old pantheons, because he sees God every- 
 where around him. He discrowns the heroes of myth and 
 romance ; but greets their like again among his living com- 
 rades. What is near to his side, beneath his feet, upon the 
 trees around him, in the men and women he consorts with, 
 bears comparison with things far off and rarities imagined : 2 
 
 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. . . 
 And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven. . . 
 And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer's girl 
 boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking short-cake. 
 
 It is the faculty of the seer, of one who has understood the 
 wonder of the world, whose eyes pierce below the surface, to 
 recognise divinity in all that lives and breathes upon our 
 planet : 3 
 
 Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all ; 
 From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-coloured 
 
 light ; 
 But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of 
 
 gold- coloured light ; 
 From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, 
 
 effulgently flowing for ever. 
 
 Pursuing this line of thought into the region of plastic art, we 
 find the elements of dignity and beauty apparent in all forms 
 of sane and healthy manhood : 4 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, 41. 2 Ibid. 31. 
 
 3 ' Leaves of Grass,' 4. 4 ' I sing the Body Electric,' 2.
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 251 
 
 The expression of the face balks account ; 
 
 But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, 
 
 It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips 
 
 and wrists ; 
 It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees 
 
 dress does not hide him ; 
 The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and 
 
 flannel. 
 
 To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more ; 
 You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. 
 
 Minor passages from Whitman's writings might be culled 
 in plenty which illustrate these general principles. He is 
 peculiarly rich in subjects indicated for the sculptor or the 
 painter, glowing with his own religious sense of beauty 
 inherent in the simplest folk : l 
 
 The beauty of all adventurous and daring persons, 
 
 The beauty of wood-boys and wood-men, with their clear, untrimmed 
 faces. 
 
 Coming home with the silent and dark-cheeked bush-boyriding behind 
 him at the drape of the day. 
 
 The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses the block sways 
 
 underneath on its tied-over chain ; 
 The negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard steady and tall he 
 
 stands, poised on one leg on the string-piece ; 
 His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast, and loosens over hi 
 
 hip-band ; 
 His glance is calm and commanding he tosses the slouch of his hat 
 
 away from his forehead ; 
 The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache falls on the black of his 
 
 polished and perfect limbs. 
 
 Detached from their context, the paragraphs which I have 
 quoted suffer from apparent crudity and paradox. It is only 
 by absorbing Whitman's poems in copious draughts, as I have 
 said, by submitting to his manner and sympathising with his 
 mood, that a conception can be formed of the wealth with 
 which he scatters plastic suggestions, and of the precision 
 with which he notes down line and colour. 
 
 1 ' Song of the Broad Axe,' 3 ; Walt Whitman, 33 ; ibid. 13.
 
 252 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 The essence of Democratic Art, so far as Whitman helps 
 us to understand it, has been sufficiently indicated. The 
 divine in nature and humanity is everywhere, if we can pene- 
 trate the husk of commonplace and reach the poetry of 
 things. There are, indeed, degrees in its manifestation. 
 Special revelations, as in the life of Buddha or of Christ for 
 instance, do not rank in the same class with the ' ever recur- 
 ring miracle of the sunrise.' The heroism of an engine-driver, 
 performing his duty, has not exactly the same moral quality, 
 the same complexity of spiritual forces in play together at 
 one moment, as the self-dedication of Menoikeus for the 
 welfare of his native city, or the oblation of their lives by 
 Cratinus and Aristodemus in order to save Athens from a 
 god-sent plague. 
 
 The pioneer of Democratic Art wishes mainly to remind 
 the world that our eyes have too long been blinded to one 
 cardinal truth the truth that virtues and beauties, wherever 
 found, are of like quality, and their essence equally divine. 
 Whitman insists upon this truth in a passage which sounds 
 paradoxical, but the grotesqueness of which is calculated to 
 arouse intelligence : l 
 
 Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three iusty angels with 
 
 shirts bagged out at their waists ; 
 
 The snag-toothed hostler, with red hair, redeeming sins past and to comei 
 Selling all he possesses, travelling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother, 
 
 and sit by him while he is tried for forgery. 
 
 The resplendent manhood of Michael, Gabriel, Kaphael, 
 ' starred from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,' is of like quality 
 with that of the three reapers. Do what we will, our imagina- 
 tion cannot transcend the stalwart strength of thews and 
 sinews. We can clothe this strength with grace, gift it with 
 ethereal charm, inspire it with ideal fancy, wrap it around in 
 religious mystery. But the beautiful, strong body of the man 
 remains the central fact for art. In like manner, the spirit of 
 Christ revives in the poor, ugly drudge, 'despised and rejected 
 of men,' like Paul, ' of presence weak, of speech contemptible,' 
 1 Walt Whitman, 41.
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 253 
 
 who devotes his substance and his time to support and, if 
 possible, to save an erring brother. 
 
 This piercing through gauds and trimmings, this unmasking 
 and unbaring of appearances, this recognition of divinity in 
 all things, is the secret of Democratic Art. It is not altogether 
 different from what Jesus meant when he said : ' Inasmuch 
 as ye have done it to one of the least of these, ye do it unto 
 me." Nor does the supreme doctrine of redemption through 
 self-sacrifice and suffering lose in significance if we extend it 
 from One, imagined a pitiful and condescending God, to all 
 who for a worthy cause have endured humiliation, pain, an 
 agonising death. Not to make Christ less, but to make him 
 the chief of a multitude, the type and symbol of triumphant 
 heroism, do we think of the thousands who have died on 
 battle-fields, in torture-chambers, at the stake, from lingering 
 misery, as expiators and redeemers, in whom the lamp of the 
 divine spirit shines clearly for those who have the eyes 
 to see. 
 
 VI 
 
 The most perplexing branch of our inquiry has to be 
 affronted, when we ask the question ; What kind of literature 
 and art is demanded by Democracy ? How is Art to prove 
 its power by satisfying the needs and moral aspirations of the 
 people who are sovereign in a democratic age ? 
 
 The conditions under which art exists at the present time 
 render a satisfactory answer to this question well-nigh im- 
 possible. In the past epochs, Greek, Mediaeval. Italian, 
 Elizabethan, Louis XIV., Persian, Japanese, the arts had a 
 certain unconscious and spontaneous rapport with the nations 
 which begat them, and with the central life-force of those 
 nations at the moment of their flourishing. Whether that 
 central energy was aristocratic, as in Hellas ; or monarchic, 
 as in France ; or religious, as in mediaeval Europe ; or intel- 
 lectual, as in Eenaissance Italy ; or national, as in Elizabethan 
 England ; or widely diffused like a fine gust of popular in- 
 telligence, as in Japan ; signified comparatively little. Art 
 expressed what the people had of noblest and sincerest, and
 
 264 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 was appreciated by the people. No abrupt division separated 
 the nation from the poets who gave a voice to the nation. 
 The case is altered now. On the one hand we have huge 
 uncultivated populations, trained to mechanical industries and 
 money-making, aggregated in unwieldy cities or distributed 
 over vast tracts of imperfectly subdued territory, composed of 
 heterogeneous racial elements, the colluvies omnium gentium, 
 reduced by commerce and science and politics to a complex 
 of shrewdly-acting, keenly-trafficking, dumbly-thinking per- 
 sonalities, bound together by superficial education in the 
 commonest rudiments of knowledge, without strong national 
 notes of difference, and without any specific bias toward a 
 particular form of self-expression. On the other hand we 
 have cosmopolitan men of letters, poets, painters, sculptors, 
 architects, living for the most part upon the traditions of the 
 past, working these up into new shapes of beauty with power 
 and subtlety, but taking no direct hold on the masses, of 
 whom they are contentedly ignorant, manifesting in no region 
 of the world a marked national type of utterance, embodying 
 no religion in their work, destined apparently to bequeath to 
 the future an image of the nineteenth century in its confused 
 Titanic energy, diffused culture, and mental chaos. 
 
 Is Democratic Art possible in these circumstances ? Can 
 we hope that the men who write poems, paint pictures, carve 
 statues, shall enter once again into vital rapport with the 
 people who compose the nations the people who are now 
 so far more puissant and important than they ever were 
 before in the world's history ? Is there to be any place for 
 art in the real life of the future ? Or are we about to realise 
 the dream of Dupont in De Musset's satirical dialogue ? 
 
 Sur deux rayons de fer un chemin magnifique 
 De Paris a Peking ceindra ma r6publique. 
 La, cent peuples divers, confondant leur jargon, 
 Feront une Babel d'un colossal wagon. 
 La, de sa roue en feu le coche humanitaire 
 Usera jusqu'aux os les muscles de la terre. 
 Du haut de ce vaisseau les hommes stupe'faits 
 Ne verront qu'une mer de choux et de navets.
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 255 
 
 Le monde sera propre et net comme une ecuelle ; 
 L'humanitairerie en fera sa gamelle, 
 Et le globe rase, sans barbe ni cheveux, 
 Comme un grand potiron roulera dans les cieux. 
 
 In a word, do the people, in this democratic age, possess 
 qualities which are capable of evoking a great art from the 
 sympathy of men of genius ? Or is art destined to subside 
 lower and lower into a kind of Byzantine decrepitude, as the 
 toy of a so-called cultivated minority ? 
 
 It is questionable whether "Whitman will help us to see 
 light in these perplexities. Yet he has a burning belief in 
 Democracy ; and, what is more, he is one of the very few 
 great writers now alive who was born among the people, who 
 has lived with the people, who understands and loves them 
 thoroughly, and who dedicated his health and energies to 
 their service in a time of overwhelming national anxiety. 
 
 VII 
 
 Whitman is firmly persuaded that the real greatness of 
 a nation or an epoch has never been, and can never be, tested 
 by material prosperity. The wealth and strength, the 
 mechanical industries, the expansive vigour, the superabun- 
 dant population of a state, constitute its body only. These will 
 impose upon the world, control the present, and be a fact to 
 reckon with for many generations. Yet these must eventually 
 pass away, and sink into oblivion, unless the race attains to 
 consciousness and noble spiritual life. Literature and art 
 compose the soul which informs that colossal body with 
 vitality, and which will continue to exist after the material 
 forces of the race have crumbled into nothingness. Hellas 
 lives ideally in Homer, Pheidias, ^Ischylus ; Israel, in the 
 Prophets and the Psalms ; the Middles Ages, in Dante ; 
 Feudalism, in Shakespeare. But where is Phoenicia, where 
 is Carthage ? Nothing survives to symbolise their greatness, 
 because they lacked ideas and ideal utterance. 
 
 In America, Whitman finds the material conditions of a
 
 256 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 puissant nation ; but he does not find the spirit of a nation. 
 The body is there, growing larger and grander every day, for 
 ever acquiring fresh equipments and more powerful appliances. 
 Meanwhile the soul, the ideality of art and literature, com- 
 mensurate with this gigantic frame, is wanting. 
 
 Viewed, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the 
 problem of humanity all over the civilised world is social and religious, 
 and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, 
 the divine literatus comes. 1 Never was anything more wanted than, 
 to-day, and here in The States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the 
 great literatus of the modern. 2 
 
 What is our religion ? he asks. ' A lot of churches, sects, 
 &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of 
 religion.' 
 
 What is our national prosperity ? ' The magician's serpent 
 in the fable ate up all the other serpents ; and money-making 
 is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of 
 the field.' 
 
 What does our huge material expansion amount to ? 'It 
 is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and 
 more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with 
 little or no soul.' 
 
 What are our cities ? ' A sort of dry and flat Sahara 
 appears these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malfor- 
 mations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics.' 
 
 What is our boasted culture ? ' Do you term that per- 
 petual, pistareen, paste-pot work American art, American 
 drama, taste, verse ? ' Instead of poets corresponding to the 
 pitch and vigour of the race, he sees ' a parcel of dandies and 
 ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us 
 with their thin sentiment of parlours, parasols, piano-songs, 
 tinkling rhymes, the five hundredth importation, or whimpering 
 and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit 
 
 1 These, and all other italics, are mine ; intended to direct attention 
 
 to the main points, as I conceive them, in my quotations from Whitman. 
 
 - This and the following extracts are taken from ' Democratic Vistas.'
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 257 
 
 after another, and for ever occupied in dyspeptic amours with 
 dyspeptic women.' 1 
 
 After this fashion, with superfluous reiteration, and con- 
 siderable asperity, Whitman pours forth his deep-felt conviction 
 of America's spiritual inadequacy. 
 
 But what does he demand in lieu of those ' most dismal 
 phantasms, which usurp the name of religion ; ' in lieu of 
 ' the magician's serpent, money-making ; ' in lieu of the 
 ' Sahara of frivolous and petty cities ; ' in lieu of ' paste-pot 
 work,' and ' dapper little gentlemen,' and 'tinkling rhymes,' 
 and ' dyspeptic amours ' ? Democracy in the cradle, in its 
 stronghold, as it seems, is infected with these congenital 
 diseases. Let us attempt to analyse what he proposes, and 
 how he thinks the vital forces of the future are to be 
 developed. 
 
 Whitman maintains that the cardinal elements of national 
 greatness are robust character, independent personality, 
 sincere religiousness. He contends that the democratic idea, 
 properly grasped and sytematically applied to conduct, will 
 suffice to reconstitute society upon a sound basis, and to 
 supply the modern nations with the ideality they lack. 
 
 Of all this, and these lamentable conditions, to breathe into them the 
 breath recuperative of sane and heroic life, I say a new founded literature 
 not merely to copy and reflect existing surfaces, or pander to what is 
 called taste not only to amuse, pass away time, celebrate the beautiful, 
 the refined; the past, or exhibit technical, rhythmic, or grammatical 
 dexterity but a literature underlying life, religious, consistent with 
 science, handling the elements and forces with competent poiuer, teaching 
 and training men and, as perhaps the most precious of its results, 
 achieving the redemption of women out of those incredible holds and 
 webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion and 
 thus insuring to The States a strong and sweet female race, a race of 
 perfect mothers is what is needed. 
 
 1 ' Dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women,' is a fine motto for the 
 American society novel. So is another of Whitman's phrases : ' The sly 
 settee and the adulterous, unwholesome couple,' for the modern French 
 novel. 
 
 S
 
 268 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 In culture, as it at present exists, the forces are alien and 
 antagonistic to Democracy. Therefore Whitman attacks it 
 vigorously in a long polemical argument : 
 
 Dominion strong is the body's; dominion stronger is the mind's. 
 What has filled, and fills to-day our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the 
 standards therein, is yet foreign. The great poems Shakespeare in- 
 cluded are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the 
 common people, the life-blood of Democracy. The models of our litera- 
 ture, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in 
 courts, and basked and grown in castle sunshine ; all smells of princes' 
 favours. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty, contri- 
 buting after their kind; many elegant, many learned, all complacent. 
 But, touched by the national test, or tried by the standards of Demo- 
 cratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single 
 writer, artist, lecturer, or what not, that has confronted the voiceless, 
 but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration 
 of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. 
 
 Culture is good enough in its way ; but it is not what 
 forms a manly personality, as sound and simple faith. ' As 
 now taught, accepted, and carried out, are not the processes 
 of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who 
 believe in nothing ? Shall a man lose himself in countless 
 masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to 
 this, that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy, 
 and brave parts of him are reduced and chipped away, like 
 the bordering of box in a garden ? You can cultivate corn, 
 and roses, and orchards ; but who shall cultivate the primeval 
 forests, the mountain peaks, the ocean, and the tumbling 
 gorgeousness of the clouds ? Lastly is the readily given 
 reply that culture only seeks to help, systematise, and put 
 in attitude the elements of fertility and power, a conclusive 
 reply ? ' The only culture useful to Democracy is bound to 
 aim less at polish and refinement of taste than at the bracing 
 of character. 'It must have for its spinal meaning the 
 formation of typical personality of character, eligible to the 
 uses of the high average of men and not restricted by condi- 
 tions ineligible to the masses. The best culture will always 
 be that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving 
 perceptions, and of self-respect.'
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 259 
 
 Since you cannot cultivate the primeval forests, and so 
 forth, you must study and assimilate them. Since the people 
 do not need to be refined in taste, but to be braced in charac- 
 ter, you must penetrate their character and reproduce it in 
 ideal conceptions. The right formative influences for modern 
 literature and art have therefore to be sought in the people 
 themselves ; in the principles of independence and equality, 
 of freedom, brotherhood, and comradeship, which are inherent 
 in Democracy, and by right of which Democracy enfolds a 
 religious ideal comparable to the spiritual liberty of the 
 Gospel. 
 
 Did you, too, O friend, suppose Democracy was only for elections, 
 for politics, or for a party name ? I say Democracy is only of use there 
 that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in 
 the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs in 
 Religion, Literature, colleges, and schools Democracy in all public and 
 private life, and in the Army and Navy. I have intimated that, as a 
 paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realisers and believers. I 
 do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagand- 
 ists or champions, or has been essentially helped, though often harmed 
 by them. ... It is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully received, the 
 fervid, the absolute faith. I submit, therefore, that the fruition of 
 Democracy on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future. 
 
 Meanwhile, for those who believe that national greatness 
 can only be tested by the spirit which a people manifests, 
 it remains to fix attention firmly on the permanent and 
 indestructible significance of arts and letters : 
 
 The literature, songs, aesthetics, etc., of a country are of importance 
 principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of per- 
 sonality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a 
 thousand effective ways. 
 
 But what has culture, as yet, done to strengthen the 
 personality of the millions of America ? 
 
 When I mix with these interminable swarms of alert turbulent 
 good-natured, independent citizens, mechanics, clerks, young persons 
 at the idea of this mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so 
 proud, a singular awe falls upon me. I feel, with dejection and amaze- 
 ment, that among our geniuses and talented writers or speakers, few or 
 
 82
 
 260 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 none have yet really spoken to this people, or created a single image- 
 making work that could be called for them or absorbed the central 
 spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs, and which, thus, in 
 highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpressed. 
 
 Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our 
 fate, whose long unravelling stretches mysteriously through time 
 dreamed out, portrayed, hinted already a little or a larger band a 
 band of brave and true, unprecedented yet armed and equipped at 
 every point the members separated, it may be, by different dates and 
 states, or south, or north, or east, or west Pacific or Atlantic a year, 
 a century here, and other centuries there but always one, compact in 
 soul, conscience-conserving, God inculcating, inspired achievers, not 
 only in Literature, the greatest art, but achievers in all art a new 
 undying order, dynasty, from age to age transmitted a band, a class, at 
 least as fit to cope with current years, our dangers, needs, as those who, 
 for their times, so well, in armour or in cowl, upheld and made illus- 
 trious, the feudal, priestly world. To offset chivalry, indeed, those 
 vanquished countless knights, and the old altars, abbeys, all their 
 priests, ages and strings of ages, a knightlier and more sacred cause 
 to-day demands, and shall supply, in a New World, to larger, grander 
 work, more than the counterpart and tally of them. 
 
 VIII 
 
 So far I have followed Whitman in his polemic against 
 the culture of his country and this century. Many of his 
 prophetic utterances will appear inapplicable to Europe. 
 Yet Democracy, whether we like it or not, has to be faced 
 and accepted in the Old as well as the New World. Here, 
 therefore, as across the Atlantic, Democracy is bound to 
 produce an ideal of its own, or to ' prove the most tremendous 
 failure of time.' Here, as there, ' long enough have the 
 people been listening to poems in which common humanity, 
 deferential, bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors.' 
 And yet, here, as there, the people have arrived at empire. 
 It is no longer possible to apostrophise them in the words of 
 Campanella's famous sonnet : 
 
 The people is a beast of muddy brain 
 
 That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands 
 Loaded with wood and stone ; the powerless hands 
 Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein :
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 261 
 
 One kick would be enough to break the chain ; 
 
 But the beast fears, and what the child demand" 
 
 It does ; nor its own terror understands, 
 
 Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. 
 Most wonderful ! with its own hand it ties 
 
 And gags itself gives itself death and war 
 
 For pence doled out by kings from its own store. 
 Its own are all things between earth and heaven ; 
 
 But this it knows not ; and if one arise 
 
 To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven. 
 
 In Europe, again, as in America, the founts of earlier 
 inspiration are failing. Classical antiquity and romance 
 cannot supply perennial nutriment for modern art. The 
 literary revolution which I described at the beginning of this 
 essay, dethroned those elder deities and threw the sanctuary 
 of the spirit open. Science, the sister of Democracy, brings 
 man face to face with nature, and with God in nature. A 
 more ethereal spirituality than has yet been dreamed of 
 begins to penetrate our conceptions of the universe, of law, of 
 duty, of human rights and destinies. Art and literature, if 
 they are to hold their own, must adapt themselves to these 
 altered conditions. They must have a faith not in their 
 own excellence as art, and in their several styles and rhythms 
 but in their mission and their power to present 'the genius 
 of the age, its religion and its character, with the same force 
 as the Greek sculptors presented paganism and the Italian 
 painters presented mediasval Catholicity. If they cannot 
 ascend to this endeavour they are lost. 
 
 ' Literature, strictly considered,' says Whitman, 'has never 
 recognised the People, and, whatever may be said, does not 
 to-day. ... I know nothing more rare, even in this country, 
 than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the 
 People of their measureless wealth of latent power and 
 capacity, their vast artistic contrasts of lights and shades, 
 with, in America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and 
 a certain breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far 
 surpassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes, or any 
 haut-ton coteries, in all the records of the world.' 
 
 This assertion he proceeds to support by reference to the
 
 262 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 great American war. 'Probably no future age can know, 
 but I well know, how the gist of this fiercest and most reso- 
 lute of the world's warlike contentions resided exclusively in 
 the unnamed, unknown rank and file ; and how the brunt 
 of its labour of death was, to all essential purposes, Volun- 
 teered.' ' Grand common stock ! to me the accomplished 
 and convincing growth, prophetic of the future ; proof un- 
 deniable to sharpest sense of perfect beauty, tenderness, and 
 pluck, that never feudal lord, nor Greek, nor Eoman breed 
 yet rivalled.' 
 
 We now understand what Whitman means by ' the divine 
 average ' ; why he exclaims : ' Ever the most precious in the 
 common. Ever the fresh breeze of field, or hill, or lake is 
 more than any palpitation of fans, though of ivory, and 
 redolent with perfume ; and the air is more than the costliest 
 perfumes.' 
 
 Finally, something must be said about Whitman's attitude 
 toward the past. His polemic against contemporary culture, 
 his firm insistence upon the fact that ' the mind, which alone 
 builds the permanent edifice, haughtily builds for itself,' 
 and that consequently a great nation like America, a new 
 principle like Democracy, is bound to find its own ideal 
 expression or ' to prove the most tremendous failure of 
 time ' all this may blind us to his reverence for the arts 
 and literatures of races and of ages which have passed away. 
 How easy it would be to assume a contempt for history 
 in Whitman is clear enough to students of his writings. 
 From the pages which he dedicates to the use and value of 
 bygone literatures it will be sufficient to extract the following 
 paragraph : 
 
 Gathered by geniuses of city, race, or age, and put by them in the 
 highest of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the peculiar combina- 
 tions, and the outshows of that city, race, and age, its particular modes 
 of the universal attributes and passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and 
 gods, wars, traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys (or the subtle 
 spirit of these) having been passed on to us to illumine our own selfhood 
 and its experiences what they supply, indispensable and highest, if 
 taken away, nothing else in all the world's boundless storehouses could 
 make up to us or ever return again.
 
 MMOCRATIC ART 263 
 
 This is an emphatic reassertion of the principle that 
 ' dominion strong is the body's ; dominion stronger is the 
 mind's.' Not for an age or nation, but for all humanity and 
 all time, abides the truth that material strength and greatness 
 are but bone, and thew, and sinew; literature and art 
 constitute the soul. Therefore the prophets, poets, thinkers, 
 builders, sculptors, painters, musicians of past ages and of 
 foreign lands, abide imperishable, shining like suns and stars 
 fixed in the firmament of man's immortal mind. Stupendous 
 are they indeed, but distant, unfamiliar ; appealing indirectly 
 to modern hearts and brains. Our admiration for them, the 
 use we make of them, the lessons we learn from them, must 
 not degrade us into the frivolity of imitative culture. We 
 have to bear steadfastly in mind that it is our duty to 
 emulate them by creating corresponding monuments of our 
 own spirit, suns and stars which shall shine with them ' in 
 the spaces of that other heaven, the Kosmic intellect, the 
 soul.' 
 
 Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were, in your atmospheres, 
 grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old 
 while our genius is Democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but 
 breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils not to enslave 
 us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own perhaps 
 (dare we say it ?) to dominate, even destroy, what yourselves have left ! 
 On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and 
 measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, 
 with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet demo- 
 cratic despots of the west ! 
 
 IX 
 
 Thus, the upshot of Walt Whitman's message is that the 
 people, substantial as they are, and full of all the qualities 
 which might inspire a world-literature, have up to the present 
 time found no representative in poetry and art. The sacer 
 vates of Democracy has not appeared. 'The fruition of 
 Democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in 
 the future.' 
 
 This is not the place to inquire how far Whitman has
 
 264 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 himself fulfilled the conditions of writing for the people. 
 Judged by his acceptance in America, he can hardly be said 
 to have succeeded in his own lifetime. The many-headed 
 beast there, if it has not literally ' trampled him in gore,' 
 turns a deaf ear to his voice, and treats him with indifference. 
 Hitherto he has won more respect from persons of culture 
 in Great Britain than from the divine average of The States. 
 
 X 
 
 After reading the foregoing pages, some one will perhaps 
 object that Democratic Art is nothing new, and that the thing 
 itself called for the invention of no such name to designate 
 it. ' Have not the eyes of all but pedants and precisians 
 been open to the poetry of common objects and of humble 
 people ? ' He will then point to Theocritus and Longus ; cite 
 Virgil's Georgics and Bucolics ; enlarge upon Dutch painting ; 
 run through the list of Defoe, Hogarth, Smollett, Morland, 
 Wilkie, Crabbe ; and wind up with special references to certain 
 passages of the Elizabethan Drama. 
 
 Such reasoning does not meet the arguments advanced by 
 Whitman ; nor does it satisfy the claims which those who 
 comprehend the word Democracy put forward. Yet it is 
 worthy of consideration, if only for the sake of defining what 
 is meant by Democratic Art. 
 
 The faculty for seeing beauty in the simplest people and 
 the commonest things has, indeed, been granted to all poets 
 and all artists worthy of the name. But this faculty, in the 
 age on which we now have entered, will need to be exercised 
 in a very different way and with far other earnestness. 
 
 When we consider Greek pastorals in verse and prose, or 
 Latin didactic poems upon rural life, we detect a note of con- 
 descension, a scrupulous avoidance of bare fact, a studious 
 selection of details agreeable to the cultivated sense. The 
 rustics pose, or are transfigured. Their humanity is toned 
 down to elegance, and the landscape is sketched in accordance 
 with the literary ideal of Arcadia. This way of treatment 
 implies a suppression of the true and a suggestion of the
 
 DEMOCRATIC ART 265 
 
 false. While exalting imaginary virtues of simplicity, con- 
 tentment, and industry, these idyllic and didactic poets ignore 
 reality and make playthings of their models. From their 
 insincerity we have derived the intolerable sham of the 
 modern pastoral. What Democratic Art demands is an 
 intelligent representation of peasant-life in its actuality : not 
 such a distorted picture as Zola painted in ' La Terre,' where 
 all the ugliest details are artfully extracted and agglomerated ; 
 but something which shall reveal the essential qualities of 
 human virtue and vice, of passion and endurance, struggle and 
 achievement, capacity for high and sordid action, in tillers 
 of the soil. The poet and the artist must repel the tempta- 
 tion to prettify his subject by the addition of masquerade 
 refinement, or to vilify it by exposing only what is brutal. 
 He must be ready to extract its specific quality from the 
 phase of life he treats, believing that it contains its own 
 tragedy, its own dignity, its suffering, crime, pride, nobility, 
 and baseness. He must be able to recognise that there is as 
 much real beauty in the peasant's husk as in the prince's a 
 russet beech-nut being no less beautiful than the ruddy rind of 
 a pomegranate. He must feel that the implements of labour, 
 the attire of reaper or of milkmaid, the woodland ways and 
 field-paths of such folk, the light falling upon their home- 
 stead, and the simplicity of its interior, offer peculiar elements 
 of loveliness which are wanting to the sumptuous buildings, 
 stately terraces, and splendid costumes of Versailles or Villa 
 d'Este. 
 
 In Dutch painting we find a genuine species, but a narrow 
 species, of the type in question. There is no note of con- 
 descension, no avoidance of fact, no selection of details 
 pleasing to the cultivated taste. Sensuous enjoyment of a 
 vulgar sort has been sympathetically felt, and rendered with 
 artistic delight in its surroundings. The beauty of the husk, 
 such as it is, receives ample justice. Loving care has been 
 expended on the development of light and shadow, colour, the 
 modelling of household gear, the delineation of industries and 
 occupations. But the result is unspiritual ; the poetry, for 
 the most part, is poetry of the pot-house. Democratic Art
 
 266 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 wants more than this. It does not merely look for humorous, 
 or comic, or sensual suggestions from tlsje people. 
 
 Hogarth and the painters of his kind, who have addicted 
 themselves to satire, need not detain us k>ng. In ' The Idle 
 Apprentice,' as in ' Marriage a la Mode,' Hpgarth exposed the 
 vices of society. His touch was impartial ; and, in so far, 
 he deserves to be called democratic. But the true note of 
 Democratic Art, its interpretation of the people to themselves, 
 its creation of a popular ideal, its vindication of, the loveliness 
 and dignity of human life apart from class distinctions, its 
 recognition of the beauty which is inseparable from certain 
 crafts and occupations, its perception of the divine in average 
 human beings, cannot be demanded from Hogarth and his 
 school. They, as satirists, show us chiefly that men can be 
 bad alike in palaces and hovels. 
 
 We find more sterling quality in Crabbe : if only Crabbe 
 were not so grim, so weighed down with the prosaio misery 
 of existence. Crabbe has the democratic sympathy ; but 
 circumstances prevented him from ascending to the democratic 
 exultation. And here, too, Wordsworth, who might be 
 claimed as a pioneer of Democratic Art in England, fails to 
 strike the right note. He has much of the needful feeling, 
 but too much of the interdicted condescension. In all his 
 work there remains a certain aloofness from the subject, and 
 a tendency to improve it for moral purpose. Born in n 
 aristocratic age, he preaches to the people, or ostentatiously 
 takes lessons from them, or shows obtrusively that he ip 
 studying them. There is in Wordsworth little of frank 
 comradeship or hearty faith, an excessive amount of what 
 Whitman calls ' copious dribble ' about men and forces 
 discerned by him in a complacent, purblind fashion. 
 
 It is hardly worth while pausing to consider whether 
 Elizabethan poetry is Democratic. The whole body of 
 literature belonging to that age was produced under the 
 influence of monarchical and feudal ideas, and is therefore 
 representative of an order which Democracy displaces. Its 
 true greatness consists in a burning national enthusiasm ; but 
 the nation is still regarded as a hierarchy of well-defined
 
 DEMOCRATIC ABT 267 
 
 classes. The sovereign, peers spiritual and temporal, clerks 
 and clergy, untitled gentry, lawyers in their several degrees, 
 yeomen, merchants, artisans, and peasants, build up society. 
 Each class has its own duties, its own privileges, and enjoys 
 that self-respect which proceeds from the sense of an assured 
 immutable position in the commonwealth. There is, there- 
 fore, nothing really democratic in the manliness, the freedom, 
 and the joyousness of Elizabethan poetry. Even the realistic 
 dramas of Heywood and Dekker, which so delightfully set 
 forth the beauty of humble lives and the virtues of the 
 people, are not democratic. Whitman is right in saying that 
 ' Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising Feudalism in 
 literature ' ; nor is the truth of this remark affected by the 
 fact that when Shakespeare lived, the feudal order he so 
 vividly portrayed had practically become a thing of the past. 
 Its vigour and utility decayed during the Wars of the Roses. 
 But time's mutations are slowly effected in Great Britain ; and 
 three centuries since Shakespeare's entrance upon his career 
 as dramatist have not sufficed to purge the English mind of 
 feudal notions. They survive, amid all changes of society, in 
 the form of snobbery, class prejudice, lord worship, and stupid 
 talk about the lower orders. 
 
 This being the case, it is not easy to indicate anything in 
 our literature and art which bears the democratic hall-mark. 
 Other European nations present the same general features of 
 decayed, yet still pervasive feudalism. Switzerland, where 
 democracy has been achieved in practice, has developed no 
 genius for art creation. 
 
 Yet a few examples may be selected, which seem in part 
 at least to yield the quality desired. Blake's lyrics, George 
 Sand's village stories, Gotthelf 's ' Ulrich,' George Eliot's 
 ' Silas Marner,' Pierre Loti's ' Mon Frere Yves,' Eudyard 
 Kipling's ' Soldiers Three,' Clough's ' Bothie,' some of 
 Thomas Hardy's Wessex Novels, in literature, are on the 
 right track. So is the great work of the Russian novelists, 
 Turgeneff, Tolstoi, Dostoieffsky. 
 
 In art we may speak of Millet, so profound in feeling, 
 so dumbly eloquent, so tragic ; of Mason, who, in spite of
 
 268 DEMOCRATIC ART 
 
 superficial affectation, expressed the poetry of simple life 
 with a wonderful sense of music ; of Frederick Walker, whose 
 young working-men and vagrant women assumed the grandeur 
 of Pheidias without loss of reality ; of Hamo Thornycroft, 
 whose statue of the ' Mower ' deserves to be placed in the 
 same rank with Walker's picture, ' At the Gate.' 
 
 These instances are not meant to be exhaustive ; nor are 
 all the works mentioned of equal merit. I fear that, with the 
 exception of Millet's pictures and the Russian novels, they 
 would find but little favour in the eyes of our aspiring and 
 exacting critic Whitman. Such as they are, however, they 
 illustrate to some extent the ideality which must in course of 
 time be extracted from the people, if art is to regain vitality 
 under the conditions of a Democratic age. 
 
 The duty of art in the immediate future is to manifest the 
 immanence of the divine in nature and man. While doing so 
 pursuing her own chase of beauty, not moralising and not 
 preaching, but seeing and unmasking the God hidden in the 
 husk of things art will once more serve the permanent 
 spiritual needs of humanity. This is Democratic Art. The 
 kingdom of the Father has passed ; the kingdom of the Son 
 is passing ; the kingdom of the Spirit begins.
 
 LANDSCAPE 
 
 A VOLUME might be devoted to landscape, if this subject 
 were to be exhaustively discussed. Nor could the task be 
 performed without full knowledge of the arts and extensive 
 familiarity with the work of innumerable painters in all 
 countries. My aim is not of this ambitious nature. In the 
 present essay I wish to indicate what it is in modern ways of 
 thinking and of feeling, which has given so great an import- 
 ance to scenery in our literature and figurative art. 
 
 It is an error to suppose that the ancients were insensible 
 to the charm and beauty of external nature. Much has been 
 written about their attitude toward landscape and the parsi- 
 mony of picturesque description in their poetry. Yet sufficient 
 stress is rarely laid upon the difference between the Greeks 
 and the Romans in this matter. Nor has it been made clear 
 enough, perhaps, that classical literature in its later stages 
 exhibits more of what we may call the modern feeling than 
 we find in Homer and the Attic writers. 
 
 The Greek way of regarding nature differed widely from 
 ours, and encouraged a different order of artistic symbolism. 
 In their religion the Greeks deified the powers of the universe 
 under concrete forms of human personality. When they 
 gazed upon sky, earth, and sea, the image of an idealised 
 man or woman intervened between their imaginative reason 
 and the natural object. The mystery of the woods and wilds 
 was Pan. Fauns and Hamadryads started from the leafy 
 shade of forest trees. Tritons blew blasts upon their conch- 
 shells, careering on the crests of stormy billows. Nereids 
 swam up from azure deeps to glide across the surface of calm
 
 270 LANDSCAPE 
 
 ocean. Naiads shrank from sight among fern-tufted fountains. 
 The evening star lured shepherds to his love, leaning in 
 twilight from the ridge of (Eta. The dawn, a rosy-fingered 
 damsel, left the couch of gray and shadowy Tithonus. The 
 sun-god stopped his steeds in mid-career at Hera's word, or 
 lent his flaming chariot to mortals for their ruin. The maiden 
 moon bent down at night to kiss her sweetheart in the solitude 
 of Latinos. 
 
 Haunted by such conceptions, the poet and the artist could 
 not look on nature as we do. A multitude of fancy-fashioned 
 beings, with distinct characters and with legends of their own, 
 arose between his mind and the external world. Sculpture, 
 the dominant art of the race in its best period, gave substantial 
 shape to these creatures of myth-making imagination. When 
 utterance was sought in verse or in plastic symbolism for the 
 feelings stirred by landscape, all vagueness, all sense of the 
 infinite, which might peradventure have been present to 
 the artist's mind, slumbered there unexpressed and inarticu- 
 late. Graceful human forms emerged, and took their place in 
 the forefront of his vision. The rest was but a background, 
 blurred and indistinct. The sentiments belonging to it had 
 no opportunity of coming to self-consciousness. 
 
 How widely and deeply this anthropomorphic sympathy 
 with nature penetrated the Hellenic imagination, and deter- 
 mined its poetical creativeness, may be seen in the legends of 
 metamorphosis. The reed by the river-margin had to be a 
 girl pursued by Pan. The cypress was a slender youth on 
 whom the wood-god doted. The pine, nodding to its fall 
 from some high precipice, had erewhile been a maiden rudely 
 clasped by the north wind. A daffodil reflected in the mirror 
 of a lakelet was Narcissus pining at the sight of his own 
 loveliness. Hyacinths, anemones, sunflowers, almond-blossoms, 
 crocuses all the ' children of the spring ' and ' nurslings 
 of the meadows,' as Chaeremon called them were thought of 
 as fair boys or girls beloved by deities. So, when a Greek 
 felt their charm, his mind instinctively reverted to the human 
 tales of passion and of fate, whereof they were for him the 
 living emblems. He did not moralise the pathos of their
 
 LANDSCAPE 271 
 
 ephemeral bloom like Herrick, or apply them to his own 
 emotions in didactic mood like Wordsworth. He told their 
 stories again, and spoke of them as Adonis, Clytia, Phyllis, 
 Hyacinthus, Myrrha. 
 
 This, then, was the Greek way of regarding nature ; and it 
 persisted in their poetry and art long after the faculty of 
 making myths had been exhausted. Another kind of senti- 
 ment for landscape, as we shall presently see, grew up in the 
 course of centuries. But so tenacious and conservative are 
 the forms of art when they have once been stereotyped in 
 verse and plastic shape, that the old legends, hallowed by 
 association, kept their grasp upon the people's mind. 
 
 Turning from Greece to Rome, we find ourselves upon an 
 alien soil. The Latin religion, though it had racial affinities 
 with the Hellenic, and though these were emphasised by the 
 early adoption of Greek literature as a standard, remained 
 more abstract in its character, more rigid and utilitarian, less 
 poetical and picturesque. Owing to the barrenness of their 
 mythology, Romans were able to view nature with eyes 
 undazzled by the mirage of the mythopoeic fancy. The stiff 
 gods and goddesses of Ovid's ' Fasti ' Robigo, Terminus, 
 and the rest of them intervened with no legendary charm of 
 human fate and passion and of human adolescence between 
 the Latin mind and landscape. Accordingly we find in the 
 earliest and the latest of the Latin poets a feeling akin to our 
 own the feeling of the natural man returning to the womb 
 which bore him and the breasts which gave him suck when 
 these came close to Nature in her solitudes. The deep and 
 solemn passion of Lucretius, the pathos of Virgil, their common 
 love for the Saturnian earth, their sense of things and thoughts 
 too deep for tears, sounded in Latin poetry a note we do not 
 hear among the Hellenes. There is in their verse the 
 mystery, the awe, the feeling after an indwelling deity, the 
 communion with nature as nature, which we are accustomed 
 to call modern. 
 
 I have elsewhere pointed out that we must look for hybrids 
 in all creations of the Roman genius. By modelling their art 
 upon the Greek type, the Romans precluded themselves from
 
 272 LANDSCAPE 
 
 developing a purely national style; and this is perhaps one 
 reason why the difference between them and their Greek 
 masters, in the matter of landscape, was not made more 
 manifest. We are able, however, to perceive this difference 
 when we have once recognised that their employment of the 
 Greek mythology of metamorphosis remained conventional 
 and artificial. 
 
 Virgil deserves Lord Tennyson's felicitous epithet of ' land- 
 scape-lover ' more than any of his predecessors. Before he 
 began to work, Greek art, in Sicilian idyls, and in mural 
 paintings, had entered on a new phase. This Virgil con- 
 tinued, adding a richness of colour, a variety of observation, 
 and a glow of emotion all his own, to the transcripts from 
 nature which abound in his poems. These pictures, however, 
 are suggestions rather than descriptions, exhibiting the finest 
 sense of what is right and fitting in the use of language for 
 pictorial effect. 
 
 Horace joins with Persius, Juvenal, and Martial in his 
 keen appreciation of rural simplicity and homeliness, contrasted 
 with the luxuries and vices of the city. Epicurean, Stoic, 
 satirist, man of the world, they are alike true lovers of the 
 country. Their enthusiasm for the farm, the wholesome fare, 
 the rustic table, and the sturdy serving-lad who waits upon 
 them with the blush of honesty and healthful youth, is unaf- 
 fected. Their vignettes from Sabine or Tuscan hill-sides are 
 touched with the truth and sincerity which spring from real 
 appreciation and keen observation. The same may be said of 
 Ovid and tne elegiac poets, though the former, in his great 
 descriptive poem of the ' Metamorphoses,' was hampered and 
 overweighted by the burden of a mythology which had no 
 vital hold on his belief. 
 
 Catullus freed himself more completely than any of these 
 poets from foreign influences. An Athenian or a Sicilian 
 could hardly have written the episode of Ariadne in the 
 Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, with its fresh and vigo- 
 rous sketches of scenery ; or the lines on Sirmium, with its 
 deep home-feeling ; or the address to the boat, with its affec- 
 tionate sympathy for the rock-pluming forests where the 
 planks from which the skiff was built were hewn.
 
 LANDSCAPE 273 
 
 While Latin literature was growing, that of Greece was 
 declining. The process of decadence, however, advanced 
 slowly ; and some minor beauties, which had been unde- 
 veloped in the earlier stages, now assumed prominence. We 
 find a distinct feeling for landscape, timid and subdued, but 
 delicately true, in the Idyls of Theocritus. The poets of the 
 Anthology, with Meleager at their head, show that the sense 
 of nature had begun to disengage itself from merely mytho- 
 logical associations. Meleager can see flowers without think- 
 ing of boys and girls beloved by deities. He calls the 
 narcissus 'rain-lover/ and the lilies are for him 'mountain- 
 wanderers.' With the decay of sculpture, painting became 
 an art of more importance. We have many indications that 
 wall-frescoes were a common feature of Graeco-Roman archi- 
 tecture. The treatise of Philostratus called CIKOJ/CS possesses 
 considerable interest, as determining the character of these 
 pictures. It is clear that though figure-subjects of the sculp- 
 turesque type still formed the staple of plastic art, scenery 
 was being treated with some degree of intelligent apprecia- 
 tion ; and the same conclusion may be arrived at after a 
 study of the Pompeian frescoes. This tendency of painting 
 reacted upon literature. The books of the Greek novelists 
 abound in exquisite landscape detail. Nature is always used 
 as a background to humanity. But this background is sympa- 
 thetically felt, and its main features are touched with an 
 evident perception of their own attractiveness. In the hands 
 of the novelists language becomes singularly euphuistic. They 
 develop rhetorical conceits, and coin quaint imagery to convey 
 the aesthetic impression made by natural objects on the human 
 sensibilities. 
 
 The Eoman poets of the Silver Age respond to this im- 
 pulse. Passing over Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, 
 and Statius, from all of whose works lovely pieces of land- 
 scape-description might be culled, I will invite attention to 
 Ausonius, in whom, at the very close of the classical period, 
 modern sentiment seems ready to expand. His poem on the 
 Moselle has always been admired for its mastery of descrip- 
 tive verse. His elegy on Roses may be read in another essay 
 
 T
 
 274 LANDSCAPE 
 
 of this collection, and its prolonged influence through modern 
 literature has there been traced. 1 I shall not therefore dwell 
 on these compositions here. But in order to show how mural 
 painting affected literature, and how a refined feeling for 
 natural beauty was then combined with Hellenic mythology* 
 I will translate the opening lines of his mystical idyl, ' Cupido 
 Cruci Affixus,' together with its dedication in prose to the 
 poet's ' son ' Gregorius. The verses describe a fresco in a 
 friend's house, which represented the crucifixion of Cupid by 
 the heroines in Elysium dames of ancient story, who had 
 long since died for love and the god's flagellation by his 
 mother with a scourge of roses. 
 
 ' Tell me,' begins the dedicatory epistle ; ' did you ever 
 see some shadowy fancy painted on a wall ? I am sure you 
 have, and that you have kept it in remembrance. At Treves, 
 for instance, in the dining-room of ^olus, there is this picture 
 which I will describe : Cupid is being crucified by women 
 who were lovers not those of our times, sinners by their own 
 will but dames of the heroic age, who justify their conscience 
 and force the god to bow they whose fate in the fields of 
 lamentation our Virgil hath sung. I gazed upon this work 
 of art with admiration, both for its beauty and its subject. 
 Soon afterwards, the emotion of wonder in my mind merged 
 in a foolish impulse to write verses. Except the theme, 
 nothing pleases me in this production. Yet I submit my 
 by-blow of the Muses to your kind attention. We love 
 even our warts and scars if they are part of us, and not 
 content with having paid the debt to our own natural frailty, 
 seek that these defects in us should win affection. Yet why 
 should I go about to win from you a favourable hearing for 
 the eclogue? I am sure that you will take with kindness 
 what you know to be a thing of mine. This I regard more 
 than that you should praise it. Farewell. 
 
 ' In those shadowy fields whereof the Muse of Maro sings, 
 
 where myrtle groves yield gloomy shelter to lost souls of 
 
 lovers, the dames of old were once assembled for their mystic 
 
 rites, and each bore emblems of her doom according as she 
 
 1 ' The Pathos of the Eose in Poetry.'
 
 LANDSCAPE 275 
 
 died on earth. 1 They wandered in woodland vast beneath the 
 niggard light, among tresses of wavering reeds and heavy- 
 headed poppies, by silent lakes without a flaw and rivulets 
 that have no murmur in their ripple. Along the margin of 
 those waters, dimly seen through twilight, pine flowers upon 
 whose petals writ in tears are names of princes and of boys 
 Narcissus gazing on his own fair face, and Crocus of the 
 golden curls, and Hyacinth the son of CEbalus, and Adonis 
 dyed in purple hue, and Salaminian Aias stamped with his 
 deep tragic groan. These remembrances of death and sorrow, 
 symbols of lamentation and of love, recall to mind the anguish 
 of stern fates erewhile assoiled and buried in the tomb, and 
 bring before those heroines the memory of scenes enacted by 
 them also in the world above.' 
 
 The sentiment for nature to which I want to call attention 
 in these lines is exhibited by the poet's sense of atmosphere, 
 his feeling for tone, his subordination of the figures to the 
 composition. The whole forms a picture ; and even the Greek 
 mythology of the flowers is so treated as to recede into a 
 region of symbolic spirituality. The landscape suggested by 
 these two hexameters : 
 
 Inter arundineasque comas gravidumque papaver 
 Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos 
 
 I transcribe the original of these lines : 
 
 Aeris in campis, memorat quos Musa Maronis, 
 Myrteus amentes ubi lucus opacat amantes, 
 Orgia ducebant heroides et sua quaeque, 
 Ut quondam occiderant, leti argumenta gerebant, 
 Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna, 
 Inter arundineasque comas gravidumque papaver 
 Et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos : 
 Quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent 
 Fleti olim regum et puerorum nomina flores, 
 Mirator Narcissus et (Ebalides Hyacinthus, 
 Et Crocus auricomans et murice pictus Adonis, 
 Et tragico scriptus gernitu Salaminius Aias. 
 Omnia quse lacrimis et amoribus anxia maestis 
 Exercent memores obita jam morte dolores, 
 Bursus in amissum revocant heroidas sevum.
 
 276 LANDSCAPE 
 
 is no less charming than their rhythm is melodiously melan- 
 choly. We are transferred to some quiet Umbrian or Tuscan 
 valley after sunset, when the waning pallor of the west 
 slumbers in pools of scarcely flowing water. 
 
 II 
 
 The nascent feeling for landscape which we see unfolding 
 in the latest period of Greek and Eoman art, had no oppor- 
 tunity of attaining to independence during the first eight 
 centuries which succeeded to the downfall of the Empire. 
 Such sentiments as had existed in the classical age were con- 
 nected immediately or remotely with polytheism. Christianity 
 introduced a vehemently hostile spirit, which in its reactionary 
 fervour opposed God to nature. The whole fabric of mytho- 
 logical religion was suppressed, and nothing appeared to take 
 its place. 
 
 Under the then prevalent conceptions of the universe, no 
 intelligent being could take either scientific or artistic interest 
 in a world considered radically evil and doomed to wrathful 
 overthrow. Man's one business was to work out his salvation, 
 to disengage himself from the earth on which his first parents 
 had yielded to sin, and to wean his heart from the enjoyment 
 of terrestrial delights. Whether he succeeded or not matters 
 little to our argument. In either case the theoretical attitude 
 of mind implied in medieval Christianity was inimical to 
 knowledge and to art. Beauty came to be regarded as a 
 snare. The phenomena of nature were vilipended as not 
 worth a thought ; or if any attention was paid to them in 
 lapidaries, bestiaries, and the like, the childish monastic 
 intellect whimsically subjected them to a system of allegorical 
 interpretation. 
 
 Under these influences both literature and the plastic arts 
 decayed. Architecture, the most abstract and utilitarian of 
 the fine arts, bridged over the long tract of assthetical vacuity 
 between the death of Claudian and the re-birth of poetry in 
 Provence. It owed this continued existence to its disconnec- 
 tion from ideas, and to its ecclesiastical service. Architecture
 
 LANDSCAPE 277 
 
 was useful, and it was innocent. Accordingly, it lived a 
 stunted life, while the sister arts were slumbering in the torpor 
 of suspended energy. 
 
 The Scandinavians and Teutons, who now had to be 
 absorbed into the fellowship of nations and to be educated by 
 the Church, brought with them nothing which could constitute 
 a new condition for the sense of natural beauty. Like the 
 Greeks, they looked at the world from the point of view of 
 mythology. The cosmic forces were personified in their 
 religious legends as ideal men and women. Stupendous 
 remnants of their pagan imagination survive in Eddie 
 literature. But the study of these sources shows that Norse 
 poetry was ill-adapted to fostering that sympathy with nature 
 qua nature, which had begun to germinate in the later stages 
 of Grfeco-Eoman culture. Such as it was, the dominant 
 civilising energy, that of the Latin Church, laid it under a 
 strict interdict. 
 
 Kenan observes that the most important product of the 
 Middle Ages was a sentiment of the infinite. This remark, 
 vague as it seems, bears strongly on the subject we are now 
 discussing. Classical polytheism interpolated a multitude 
 of ideal personalities between the mind and nature. All 
 these were swept away, discredited, consigned to oblivion, 
 transmuted into devils, during the ascendency of mediaeval 
 Christianity. The soul was left face to face with God, while 
 men and women continued daily to be born and die upon 
 our planet. Thus a vacuum, vast as the universe, arose 
 through the dispeopling of all that intermediate region which 
 had been agreeably filled by gods and goddesses of various 
 degrees. There was the self-conscious spirit of man ; there 
 was the transcendent reality of God ; there was the earth on 
 which man dwelt, and the heavens to cover it as with a 
 canopy. Instead of a Pantheon or Olympus, swarming with 
 deities in lieu of a comfortable world inhabited by semi- 
 human personalities infinity and fact environed human con- 
 sciousness. Infinity, the vague, incalculable, all-embracing 
 sphere, which God in ways unrealised by mortal fancy filled. 
 Fact, the hard, stern, brutal fabric of man's dwelling-place,
 
 278 LANDSCAPE 
 
 with its sufferings acute or blunted, its passions which were 
 sins, its labour which was a curse, its pleasures which were 
 temptations. Infinity and fact, both shadowy, unreal, and 
 unimaginable ; God's world and the devil's world ; each only 
 valuable to the soul in its rapport with man's eternal destiny 
 when time should be no more. That was the new medium 
 within which the genius of our race, when it recovered from 
 the torpor of the glacial epoch, had to move. Infinity and 
 fact. What would happen should theology relax her grasp 
 upon the intellect, and men once more begin to gaze around 
 with curious delight on their terrestrial dwelling-place ? 
 
 Looking back upon the past, we are able to perceive that 
 when the twilight of the modern age appeared, when the 
 ancient gods had been forgotten and Christianity had lost a 
 portion of its poignant spell, the arts and science of the 
 present time were quickening, like seeds that slumber through 
 the winter and await the spring. But an intermediate stage 
 of long duration had to be traversed. To this we give the 
 name of Renaissance. In it the intellect of man came pain- 
 fully and gladly to new life through the discovery of itself 
 and nature. 
 
 I cannot expatiate over the prospect here presented to 
 reflection. Having indicated the broad aspect of the Middle 
 Ages in relation to the topic of this essay, it is now my 
 business to show in what way man recovered that nascent 
 sympathy with nature, which had been so rudely interrupted. 
 Landscape is a minor detail in the history of the Eenaissance. 
 But it is the one we have to keep in view. 
 
 The Latin songs of the thirteenth century, in so far as 
 these touch nature, reveal a genial thawing of the spirit. 1 
 They dwell on the charm of spring-time in the country, and 
 connect the freedom of the open air with pleasures of the 
 senses. Classical literature is at work as a form-giving 
 influence. But the artistic touch on mythology has altered. 
 Bacchus and Venus and Neptune have ceased to be person- 
 alities. They reappear as names and symbols. 
 
 1 This subject has been more fully treated in my discourse upon the 
 Carmina Vagorum, entitled ' Wine, Women, and Song.'
 
 LANDSCAPE 279 
 
 The German lyrics of the Minnesingers, the ProvenQal 
 lyrics of the Troubadours, the Celtic romances of Arthur and 
 his Knights, when these touch nature, are in like manner 
 vernal. The magic of the May pervades them ; the mystery 
 of the woodland enfolds them. They are the utterances of 
 generations for whom life has revived, who have escaped the 
 winter of their discontent and bondage, to whom the world 
 is once more full of wonder-breeding interest. 
 
 Humanity, as is natural, engages the poet's first attention. 
 The earth is felt chiefly through the delightfulness of healthy 
 sensations. The stars, and clouds, and tempests of the heavens, 
 the ever-recurring miracle of sunrise, the solemn pageant of 
 sunsetting, are almost as though they were not in this 
 literature. A copse in April, a blooming garden, a grove 
 where birds sing, a storm-swept sea-beach these are the 
 landscape pictures of that epoch. But gods and goddesses 
 are absent ; the flowers are flowers, not Crocus or Adonis ; 
 the birds are birds, not Philomela wailing for her ancient 
 wrong ; the oaks contain no Hamadryads, and the fountains 
 murmur without Nymphs. Nature, though as yet a mere 
 back-scene to humanity, has emerged as Nature. 
 
 At last comes Dante, with his keen incisive touch on 
 natural things, his intense laconic descriptions of the world as 
 it appears : l 
 
 Dolce color d' oriental zaffiro. 
 
 Conobbi il tremolar della marina. 
 
 A noi venia la creatura bella 
 
 Bianco vestita e nella faccia quale 
 Par tremolando la mattutina stella. 
 
 1 Soft colour of oriental sapphire I saw and knew the light atremble 
 on the sea-marge. Toward us came the beauteous being, clothed in 
 white and with a countenance that was as is the dawn-star when it 
 trembles. Like to a lark which circles free in air, singing at first, and 
 then keeps silence, satisfied with the last sweetness of the note that fills 
 her soul. In semblance of a lion when he couches. We walked on 
 through the evening, gazing intently forward so far as eyes could reach, 
 with faces turned to meet the last and lucent rays of daylight.
 
 280 LANDSCAPE 
 
 Qual lodoletta, che in aere si spazia 
 
 Prinia cantando, e poi tace contenta 
 Dell' ultima dolcezza che la sazia. 
 
 A guisa di leon quando si posa. 
 
 Noi andavam per lo vespero attenti 
 
 Oltre, quanto potean gli occhi allungarsi, 
 Contro i raggi serotini e lucenti. 
 
 In these, and in a hundred similar passages of the ' Divine 
 Comedy,' we feel that the poet has transcended the vagueness 
 of the Middle Ages. A new spirit is awake in the world 
 Man looks again with open eyes on nature, sees the earth as 
 the ancients saw it, but without the medium of myth through 
 which the Greeks and Komans viewed it. 
 
 Contemporaneously with Dante though Dante hardly 
 shared this movement there began what is known as the 
 Revival of Learning : that resuscitation of classical literature 
 and art which exercised so potent an influence over the mind 
 of Europe. In so far as the aesthetical appreciation of external 
 nature is concerned, this contact with antiquity was not an 
 unmixed blessing. It did much to emancipate the mind from 
 theological preoccupations. It established a sense of historical 
 continuity, and restored a truer feeling for the relation between 
 mankind and the material universe. But it brought back the 
 old mythology which had previously intervened between the 
 mind and natural objects. And this mythology was no longer 
 believed in. It reappeared as mere machinery, and literary 
 or artistic artifice. Furthermore, the uncritical respect for 
 classical tradition imposed fettering restrictions on creative 
 fancy. For a long space of time, poets thought that they 
 must imitate Virgil or Horace in their descriptions ; painters 
 only introduced scenery as an accessory to figure-subjects. 
 Though men could paint the external world like Titian, they 
 dealt sparingly and occasionally with its aspects. To manu- 
 facture Tritons, Nymphs, and Fauns was an easy matter for 
 dexterous masters of the human form. These antique per- 
 sonalities were accepted in lieu of waves and woods and 
 streams. They had the double advantage of being less
 
 LANDSCAPE 281 
 
 difficult to deal with than the real things they symbolised, 
 and also of possessing the passport of classical tradition. This 
 way of representing nature in figurative art harmonised with 
 the intellectual conditions of the Renaissance. Accordingly, 
 landscape, or the portraiture of Nature as she is, remained in 
 a subordinate position. 
 
 This fact ought not to be attributed to the Revival of 
 Learning only. There is profound truth in the saying that 
 ' the proper study of mankind is man." Man awakening to 
 free consciousness at the end of the Middle Ages seized first 
 upon himself as the subject of the highest art. Nature had 
 to wait her turn. And her turn came when the cycle of 
 purely human motives, within the sphere of that period's 
 ideality, had been exhausted. It was at the close of the 
 Italian Renaissance, after Europe had been saturated with the 
 new learning, when science too was born, and men were 
 gazing with purged eyes upon the heavens of Copernicus and 
 ' thy clear stars, Galileo,' that landscape attained to inde- 
 pendence. Five great painters initiated this new departure in 
 the arts. These were Peter Paul Rubens, Nicholas Poussin, 
 Claude Lorraine, Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa a 
 Fleming strongly influenced by Italian ideas, three Italianated 
 Frenchmen, and a Neapolitan. 1 
 
 Before their appearance on the scene, landscape-painting 
 had here and there been practised with great ability and sense 
 of beauty on both sides of the Alps. Nothing can surpass 
 the refined fidelity to detail with which John van Eyck drew 
 and coloured that airy prospect over river, city, and snow-clad 
 mountains, seen from the quiet mediaeval loggia, in his picture 
 of La Vierge au Donateur. Few transcripts from external 
 nature are more impressive in their map-like, patiently 
 symbolic style than Diirer's Fortune, S. Hubert, and Knight 
 on Horseback in the sombre forest. Gentile da Fabriano's 
 sunrise upon Tuscan hills is like the dawn of life in its quaint 
 childish naivete\ It would be peevish to demand more con- 
 centrated poetry in the delineation of blue crags and sun- 
 
 1 Kubens, 1577-1640. N. Poussin, 1594-1665. Claude, 1600-1682. 
 G. Poussin, 1613-1675. S. Bosa, 1615-1673.
 
 282 LANDSCAPE 
 
 swept valleys than Titian gave us, or sweeter idyllic bits of 
 country than the minor Venetians Bissolo, Basaiti, Cima, 
 Cordegliaghi introduced as backgrounds to their sacred 
 compositions. Giorgione in his masterpiece at Castelfranco 
 translated the feeling of broad champaign and gently swelling 
 lawns into pure harmonies of gold and brown and green and 
 yellow. Tintoretto proved himself the master of a fitful, 
 passionate, suggestive scenery, turbid with emotion and sur- 
 charged with meaning, tuned by imagination to the spiritual 
 key-note of his varying themes. The gentle twilight reaches 
 of Umbrian valleys in Perugino's and young Raphael's pictures 
 have a melancholy charm peculiar to that region. Francia 
 caught their grace, and painted lands of afterglow and dewy 
 peace, with slender stems defined against the spaces of a 
 dreamy, lucid evening sky. Lionardo da Vinci's drawings 
 show that this versatile magician of the arts could sketch a 
 bit of forest with the subtlety of a French draughtsman. 
 Correggio makes us rest beside his holy travellers in pleasant 
 woodlands by the side of babbling water-brooks. 1 
 
 Everywhere, in fact, this art was waiting, ready to emerge. 
 But it had not occurred to masters of the sixteenth century 
 that landscape might be treated as an object in itself. They 
 remained at the same point as the poets Sannazzaro, 
 Poliziano, Boiardo, Ariosto whose descriptive episodes are 
 exquisite, but are never allowed to divert attention from the 
 action and passion of humanity. These remarks might be 
 applied with equal truth to Shakespeare and the rest of the 
 Elizabethan poets. 
 
 1 The picture by Van Eyck above referred to is in the Louvre. Diirer's 
 are engravings. Gentile da Fabriano's sunrise is in the predella of his 
 Adoration of the Magi, in the Florentine Academy. Titian's Marriage of 
 S. Catherine is a good example of his landscape National Gallery. For 
 Tintoretto's power over scenery, I would point to the Temptation of 
 Adam, in the Scuola di S. Kocco and in the Accademia at Venice ; to 
 the Murder of Abel, in the Accademia ; the Crucifixion, at S. Cassiano ; 
 the Last Judgment, at the Madonna dell' Orto ; the Temptation of Christ, 
 at S. Bocco. Perugino's and Francia's pictures need not be particularised. 
 With regard to Lionardo, I was thinking of a little chalk drawing in the 
 Queen's library at Windsor. At Parma there are beautiful landscape bits 
 by Correggio.
 
 LANDSCAPE 283 
 
 The importance of Rubens, Claude, the two Poussins, and 
 Salvator Rosa is that they emancipated landscape from its 
 traditional dependence upon human motives, and proved that 
 Nature in herself is worthy of our sympathy and admiration. 
 However critics may be inclined to estimate the value of their 
 work, this at least is incontestable. Rubens fills his canvas 
 with a stretch of rolling country fields and miry roads and 
 hedges open to the flying lights and shadows of a breezy 
 morning sky. Claude concentrates his thought upon the 
 luminosity of atmosphere ; whatever else he paints, he is 
 always aiming at that. Gaspar Poussin delights in the 
 brown mystery of heavy-foliaged trees with thunder-clouds 
 or sultry heavens above them. Salvator Rosa transports us 
 to the ravines of the Abruzzi, where rocks are splintered and 
 chestnut-boughs hang broken from the giant stems. Clinging 
 still to the tradition that some historical or mythological 
 subject is required to make a picture, these masters introduce 
 Abraham, Odysseus, a sacrifice to Pan, or possibly S. Jerome 
 with his skull, somewhere into their composition. But the 
 relation between the human motive and the landscape is 
 reversed. The former, which had hitherto been all-important, 
 is now subordinated to the latter. The artist's energies 
 are bestowed on working out the scene, the atmospheric 
 luminosity, the open champaign, the massive foliage, and the 
 mighty clouds. The figures are carelessly sketched in, and 
 little heed is paid to emphasizing their action. They are 
 lost, as it were, in the space, diminished by the majesty of 
 nature. Man takes his position as a portion of the world, 
 not as the being for whom the earth and heavens were 
 created. He is drawn upon those broad canvases to scale 
 with trees which overtop him, and with tracts of hill and 
 vale on which he toils a moving speck. 
 
 It would be interesting to pursue this subject further. 
 But I am not writing a history of the development of land- 
 scape painting. It is my business to deal with ideas rather 
 than with schools of art and pictures. Yet the work of the 
 Dutch masters (independent of Claude and Poussin and 
 Salvator Rosa, contemporaneous in date or somewhat later) 
 cannot be neglected. They contributed even more than these
 
 284 LANDSCAPE 
 
 men to the emancipation of art in this direction. They 
 frankly ignored the old tradition of historical motives in 
 landscape. The aspects of the earth and sea and sky, the 
 common occupations of mankind upon the fields and in their 
 dwellings, proved for them sufficient sources of inspiration. 
 Dutch painting filled the seventeenth and a portion of the 
 eighteenth century with powerful production, at a time when 
 the resources of Italy were exhausted. It delivered art from 
 the pedantry of humanism, and anticipated the European 
 revolt against classical canons of perfection. Still, the 
 essentially modern enthusiasm for nature, of which I shall 
 shortly have to speak, was not the guiding light of the Dutch 
 painters. Barely, if ever, do we detect in them a touch of 
 spirituality, a hint of mystery, an imaginative sense of some- 
 thing underlying nature. This must be sought elsewhere. 
 The first day-break of impassioned naturalism meets us in 
 the work of Norfolk drawing-masters, by the side of English 
 streams and lakes, within sight of Snowdon and Helvellyn. 
 The water-colour painters of our school, at the close of the 
 last century, continued landscape on lines suggested by the 
 Dutch. Their choice of subject was, however, more poetic ; 
 their sentiment more delicate ; their will to wait on Nature's 
 moods and to interpret her suggestions more evident. Here 
 we perceive the dawning of that sun which climbed the 
 heavens with Turner. 
 
 All this while, in literature, classical standards of taste 
 continued to prevail. External nature was treated by the 
 poets of Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries with the condescension proper to polite scholars. 
 The religion of that age was formal. Science went slowly 
 forwards, burrowing like a mole beneath the surface of 
 received ideas, and altering the fundamental relations of 
 thought mainly by the demonstration of astronomical laws. 
 A thoroughgoing change was being gradually prepared in 
 our conception of the universal order. Crude guesses, pre- 
 figuring the solid discoveries of geology, the study of primitive 
 society, and the science of comparative biology, jostled with 
 substantial acquisitions of exact knowledge in chemistry and
 
 LANDSCAPE 286 
 
 the classification of beasts and vegetables. Man's place in 
 the world was on the point of being apprehended. Never- 
 theless, the inevitable collision between theology and science 
 the coming reconstruction of opinion regarding the relation 
 of God to the universe and of mankind to this planet had 
 as yet been hardly dreamed of. It is true that the elaborate 
 structures of orthodox divinity were on the verge of being 
 rudely shaken. Yet few minds forecast the revolution ; and 
 theologians imagined that they were moving with the current 
 of modern thought when they borrowed a shallow scheme of 
 teleological optimism from what they deigned to notice in 
 the sciences. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The great creation of the Middle Ages, according to 
 M. Eenan, was the sentiment of the Infinite. We have further 
 defined this saying by showing how Christianity banished 
 from heaven and earth the antique deities and demi-gods, the 
 girls and boys transmuted into trees and flowers and water- 
 falls, leaving man alone in a world of which he had no 
 positive knowledge, face to face with a supreme abstraction, 
 God. This God, imagined omniscient and omnipresent, was 
 also imagined as separate from both nature and man. He 
 had brought the universe into existence by his word ; and he 
 could dissolve it in the twinkling of an eye. The Infinite 
 thus became the sole eventual reality. All else was illusion, 
 mirage, depending on the divine caprice. 
 
 But our mind cannot remain satisfied with abstractions. 
 The vacuum created by the demolition of mythological 
 lumber was therefore filled to some extent by another set of 
 polytheistic deities Christ, Mary, Saints, Martyrs, Angels, 
 Devils. These, however, unlike the deities of paganism, had 
 no relation to nature. So far as the material universe was 
 concerned, that remained empty. The hierarchy of the 
 Church triumphant were moral entities personified ideals of 
 human love, struggle, patience, faith, purity, and sorrowing 
 experience.
 
 286 LANDSCAPE 
 
 When at last man's affection for his home prevailed over 
 the figments of scholastic theology, humanism attempted to 
 fill up the void of nature by reintroducing the personalities of 
 classical mythology. These having lost their hold upon the 
 faith of men, were ineffectual mere chimcera bombycitiantes 
 in vacua, monsters of the fancy spinning cocoons in the abyss 
 of nothing. The Infinite remained a yawning gulf, requiring 
 to be tenanted. With every year, nature became more and 
 more a problem for curiosity, a tantalising complex of facts 
 which had to be accounted for. 
 
 The force which was growing while theology declined, and 
 which was destined to control the future, attracted slight 
 attention and roused comparatively feeble jealousy. Bruno 
 indeed suffered martyrdom for attempting to connect God 
 vitally with nature. Galileo was gagged for a different kind 
 of indiscretion. Spinoza, after his harmless life and obscure 
 death, won the reputation of a venomous atheist. Still the 
 reconstructive energy of modern thought moved onwards, 
 acting most effectively where it was least articulate. Theology 
 slighted nature from the outset, and continued to regard the 
 material universe as a field in which the curiosity of man 
 might be allowed to range. She failed to perceive that the 
 Infinite, brought into paramount importance by herself, would 
 eventually have to be identified with nature. Science, mean- 
 while, the real and rising force, waxed in obscurity, wisely 
 refraining from hostile contact with waning orthodoxy, until 
 it became a giant which might not be withstood. Like the 
 gourd of Jonah's vision, it grew and overspread the heavens. 
 Silently, imperceptibly, science asserted its right and power 
 to solve the problem of Infinity, and filled the void of nature 
 with a living spirit. God was re-discovered in the universe. 
 That whole, of which man forms a part, appeared the 
 manifestation of Deity. 
 
 While this process in the groundwork of thought was 
 unfolding, various causes contributed to the decay of 
 mediaeval Christian mythology. The principal of these 
 may be enumerated : first, criticism applied to documents 
 and historical testimony ; second, the politico-religious move-
 
 LANDSCAPE 287 
 
 merit of the Keformation ; last, but not least, although it 
 seems remote from things of mortal life the substitution of 
 the sun for the earth as the centre of our sidereal system. 
 
 Pagan myths, reintroduced by humanism like a spectral 
 corps de ballet on the empty scene of nature, had never been 
 accepted by the modern mind as more than metaphorical. 
 The vacuum, the blank created by the downfall of paganism, 
 the void space out of which issued our sense of Infinity, 
 seemed as though it would become more forlorn and oppres- 
 sive than ever. Such, indeed, it was in the Protestant theology 
 of the last century, when any palpitating human heart took 
 heed of it. But science had already begun to occupy this 
 void with a hundred forms of knowledge with the new 
 astronomy, with chemistry, with electricity, with geology, 
 biology, and the clinching doctrine of the conservation of 
 energy. All tended to the conclusion that infinity and fact, 
 the dual constituents of our environment, form one coherent 
 being of which humanity is an important integer. 
 
 The notion of a spirit immanent in Nature, sustaining sun, 
 and stars, and man, and beasts, and trees, was not new. It 
 had been held by many antique sages. Virgil expressed it in 
 his perfect literary way : * 
 
 One Life through all the immense creation runs, 
 One Spirit is the moon's, the sea's, the sun's ; 
 All forms in the air that fly, on the earth that creep, 
 And the unknown nameless creatures of the deep 
 Each breathing thing obeys one Mind's control, 
 And in all substance is a single soul. 
 
 Orphic poets, Stoics, and Neoplatonists uttered the same 
 idea with keener, more mystic ardour. Under the dominance 
 of Christianity this notion had no opportunity of moulding 
 thought. But it reappeared in the dawn of modern science, 
 at the moment when Copernicus revolutionised our theory of 
 the universe. Bruno maintained it with a burning rhetoric, a 
 passion of conviction, and a cogency of demonstration for the 
 
 1 I borrow Mr. F. W. H. Myers' admirable version from ' Essays 
 Classical,' p. 173.
 
 288 LANDSCAPE 
 
 imaginative reason, which brought him to the stake. Other 
 philosophers of sundry sects and orders, mystics, deists, pro- 
 fessed pantheists, developed it in various ways to suit their 
 several speculations. It was rhymed by Pope in well-turned 
 couplets : 
 
 All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 
 Whose body nature is, and God the soul ; 
 
 That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
 
 Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame, 
 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 
 Glows in the stars and blossoms in the trees, 
 
 Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
 
 Spreads undivided, operates unspent ; 
 
 Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, 
 
 As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart ; 
 
 As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, 
 
 As the rapt seraph that adores and burns : 
 
 To him, no high, no low, no great, no small ; 
 
 He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. 
 
 In these meditations of the poets and the sages there 
 inhered an element of visionary unsubstantial rapture. 
 Attractive as the speculation may have seemed to minds of a 
 certain stamp, it rested on no arguments of probability derived 
 from fact. Theology was justified in neglecting such cloud- 
 castles as the dreams of a disordered mind, until the moment 
 when science, steadily accumulating knowledge without 
 prophesying, had prepared a theory of the universe which 
 necessitated either the abandonment of God as the supreme 
 hypothesis, or else the acceptation of the world as God made 
 manifest in fact, co-extensive with infinity. 
 
 It is not needful to pursue this analysis, or to force a con- 
 clusion as to the right way of solving the suggested problem. 
 Else I should have to show to what a large extent the 
 idealists of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, by their methods 
 of criticism and a priori speculation, stimulated the growing 
 conception of inherent spirituality and unity in nature. For 
 the purpose of this essay it is enough to have pointed out how 
 the modern enthusiasm, which we may call cosmic, sprang up 
 in close connection with ideas like these, and how it is related
 
 LANDSCAPE 289 
 
 to the development of science which has given such ideas a 
 foundation of probability. Whether we call ourselves idealists 
 or materialists signifies little. What remains indisputable is 
 that man's interest in the world around him has been enor- 
 mously developed by the decline of mediaeval theology and 
 the progressive expansion of scientific curiosity. That alone 
 constitutes a new sphere of thought for art to work in, preg- 
 nant with ideality denied to Greece and Home, to the Middle 
 Ages and the Renaissance. It helps to account for the im- 
 portance of landscape in the present century, and en- 
 courages a belief that there remains a wide scope for it in 
 the future. 
 
 Poetry, being the most articulate of the arts, the most sus- 
 ceptive and expressive of pure thought, is the first to indicate 
 the entrance of formative ideas into the aesthetic region. We 
 must therefore interrogate the poets of this century at its 
 commencement, in order to understand the change in our 
 emotional attitude towards nature. For this purpose it will 
 suffice to select Goethe, Wordsworth, and Shelley. When we 
 compare the fervour of their verses with the colder utterance 
 of Virgil or of Pope, it becomes evident that the venerable 
 conception of Spirit immanent in the Universe has acquired a 
 fuller certainty, a deeper glow, a warmer passion of enthu- 
 siasm. This conception now rests on inferences from the 
 discoveries of physical science, and is inflamed with a hope 
 that the cosmos shall be found at length to be an animated 
 organism. It has passed from the realm of philosophical 
 suggestion or rhetorical exposition into the region of religious 
 conviction. Spirit gazing upon nature finds spirit there. The 
 intellect is warmed with the vision of infinity made vital, 
 instead of being refrigerated by a mere mechanical void. At 
 the same time, by comparing the purely descriptive passages 
 of these poets with those of their immediate predecessors 
 Thomson, Gray, Cowper we shall discern how this modern 
 metaphysical intuition has given a new touch and tone to art. 
 Writers of the last century regarded nature as outside them, as 
 a group of objects to be observed and catalogued, moralised 
 perhaps, enjoyed, but never with the sense of spiritual affinity. 
 
 u
 
 290 LANDSCAPE 
 
 With Wordsworth and the poets of his time, nature owns 
 something correspondent to man's consciousness. A positive 
 mythology, importing the imagination into science if I may 
 so express this revolution in thought about the universe 
 replaces the anthropomorphism of the Greeks, and fills at 
 last the vacuum created by mediaeval theology. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of Goethe's pantheism no better example can be found 
 than the Proemium to ' Gott und Welt.' This poem has been 
 already quoted in a previous essay ; l and for this reason I 
 shall not reproduce my English version of it here, contenting 
 myself with the observation that this sublime hymn is the 
 poetical counterpart of that philosophy which Bruno preached 
 so fervently, and which Spinoza in his colder mood denuded 
 of its religious elements faith, hope, enthusiasm, inspiration. 
 It expresses in lofty verse what Herbert Spencer has condensed 
 in well-weighed words of prose. 
 
 Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more 
 they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, 
 that he (man) is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, 
 from which all things proceed. 
 
 The scientific philosopher does not qualify that Energy by 
 any other name. The poet calls it God. 
 
 From Wordsworth we must not expect the deliberate 
 pantheism of a Bruno or a Goethe. Through whatever pro- 
 cesses of thought he passed, this man was at bottom a 
 believing Christian. On that very account his passion for 
 nature, and the deep conviction expressed in his earlier works 
 that the external universe is penetrated by a spirit which 
 also fills the soul of man, have greater value for our present 
 purpose. They prove how instinctively the modern intellect, 
 at the beginning of our century, opened to the cosmic 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 1 At the end of ' The Philosophy of Evolution,' p. 26.
 
 LANDSCAPE 291 
 
 Those lines composed above Tintern Abbey, in which 
 Wordsworth describes the two phases of nature-worship he 
 had lived through the earlier glowing and unreasoned, 
 corresponding to the heat of youthful ardour ; the later 
 reflective and religious, persisting through the ' years that 
 bring the philosophic mind' have been so often recited 
 that they dwell in the hearts of every one. 
 
 Nature then 
 
 (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 
 And their glad animal movements all gone by) 
 To me was all in all I cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite ; a feeling and a love, 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, 
 And all its aching joys are now no more, 
 And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 
 Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur ; other gifts 
 Have followed ; for such loss, I would believe, 
 Abundant recompence. For I have learned 
 To look on nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
 The still sad music of humanity, 
 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 Thus with Wordsworth the youth's love, simple and 
 sensuous, for the beauty of the world became in manhood 
 a deep mystic insight, piercing behind the veil of nature to
 
 292 LANDSCAPE 
 
 the spirit which constitutes both thought and the objects of 
 
 thought. To God he cries : 
 
 Thou, Thou alone 
 
 Art everlasting, and the blessed spirits 
 That Thou includest as the sea her waves ! 
 
 Yet God, for him, does not include souls only, as the ocean 
 includes the billows on its surface. God also includes 
 nature, and thus the poet can call nature 
 
 The nurse, 
 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being. 
 
 It is thus, too, that Lucy drew her beauty, grace, and 
 goodness ' by silent sympathy ' from woods, and clouds, and 
 stars, and rivulets, and murmuring sounds. Nature being 
 the robe of life woven perpetually by God, becomes at once 
 the oracle and the audience of humanity. Man takes the 
 meadows, woods, and mountains, and ' all that we behold 
 from this green earth,' into his confidence, feeling that they 
 are kindred to himself. In nature, as in the mind of man, 
 there dwells one spirit, from whom we gather strength, and 
 who sustains our aspiration. This is the meaning of that 
 apparent paradox : 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 But, quitting this region of high speculation, let us see 
 how Wordsworth's mysticism gave tone to his descriptions 
 of landscape. I will select the poem on the Simplon Pass, 
 than which nothing nobler in blank verse has been written 
 during this century. 
 
 Brook and road 
 
 Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass, 
 And with them did we journey several hours 
 At a slow step. The immeasurable height 
 Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, 
 The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
 
 LANDSCAPE 298 
 
 And in the narrow rent, at every turn, 
 
 Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, 
 
 The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, 
 
 The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, 
 
 Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside 
 
 As if a voice were in them, the sick sight 
 
 And giddy prospect of the raving stream, 
 
 The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, 
 
 Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light 
 
 Were all like workings of one mind, the features 
 
 Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, 
 
 Characters of the great Apocalypse, 
 
 The types and symbols of Eternity, 
 
 Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. 
 
 For the sake of comparison, here are two passages from Gray's 
 letters, one describing the ascent to the Grande Chartreuse, 
 the other the descent of the Mont Cenis : 
 
 It is six miles to the top ; the road runs winding up it, commonly 
 not six feet broad ; on one hand is the rock, with woods of pine 
 trees hanging overhead ; on the other a monstrous precipice, almost 
 perpendicular, at the bottom of which rolls a torrent, that sometimes 
 tumbling among the fragments of stone that have fallen from on high, 
 and sometimes precipitating itself down vast descents with a noise like 
 thunder, which is still made greater by the echo from the mountains 
 on each side, concurs to form one of the most solemn, the most 
 romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I ever beheld. Add to this 
 the strange views made by the crags and cliffs on the other hand ; 
 the cascades that in many places throw themselves from the very 
 summit down into the vale, and the river below ; and many other 
 particulars impossible to describe ; you will conclude We had no occasion 
 to repent our pains. 
 
 It was six miles to the top, where a plain opens itself about as many 
 more in breadth, covered perpetually with very deep snow, and in the 
 midst of that a great lake of unfathomable depth, from whence a river 
 takes its rise, and tumbles over monstrous rocks quite down the other 
 side of the mountain. The descent is six miles more, but infinitely more 
 steep than the going up ; and here the men perfectly fly down with you, 
 stepping from stone to stone with incredible swiftness in places where 
 none but they could go three paces without falling. The immensity of 
 the precipices, the roaring of the river and torrents that run into it, the 
 huge crags covered with ice and snow, and the clouds below you and
 
 294 LANDSCAPE 
 
 about you, are objects it is impossible to conceive without seeing them ; 
 and though we had heard many strange descriptions of the scene, none 
 of them at all came up to it. 
 
 Sixty years had elapsed between these descriptions by 
 Gray and the lines on the Simplon Pass by Wordsworth. 
 What a change there is in the way of feeling nature ! It may 
 be objected that I am comparing prose with poetry. But 
 Gray's Latin verses on the Grande Chartreuse and the touch on 
 nature in his English poems at large have the same quality 
 of appreciative observation from a point external to the object, 
 whereas Wordsworth's lines are distinguished by sympathy 
 with things that speak intelligibly to his soul because they 
 form a part of that in which he lives and moves and has his 
 being. The prcesens deus of Wordsworth quis deus incertum, 
 tamen est deus finds no place in Gray's philosophy. 
 
 Shelley's poetry, more than any other in our language, is 
 imbued with a mystical Platonism, which displays itself, so 
 far as our present subject is concerned, under a twofold 
 aspect. In nature Shelley seems to have divined an omni- 
 present, all-sustaining, vitalising spirit, which assumed for 
 his imagination the specific attributes of intellectual or ideal 
 beauty. In Alastor he describes the fate of one who is for 
 ever haunted by this beauty, burning dimly through things 
 of sense, and eluding the neophyte in every appearance which 
 takes form and fascination from the immanent splendour. In 
 vain Alastor pursues his vision across the world : in vain the 
 fairest creatures and sublimest scenes are offered to his gaze : 
 it is only in sleep that his soul is comforted by the divine 
 intuition ; and he dies unsatisfied, to blend with that which 
 lured him through far lands disconsolate. 
 
 He, I ween, 
 
 Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 
 Actaeon-like, and fled affrighted. 
 
 This is one side to Shelley's Platonism. But not the less 
 is there a Spirit of Life, an anima mundi, the power and 
 vital heat of which is felt in thunder and the voice of birds, 
 in the choral dances of the planets, in herbs and stones, in
 
 LANDSCAPE 295 
 
 stars and exhalations and the soul of man. This life of the 
 world has for one of its main manifestations the ideal beauty 
 which led Alastor captive. The supreme expression of the 
 world-soul, conceived as beauty, intangible, elusive, un- 
 approachable, is given in that song which a voice in the air 
 sings to Asia : l 
 
 Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle 
 
 With their love the breath between them ; 
 
 And thy smiles before they dwindle 
 
 Make the cold air fire ; then screen them 
 
 In those looks, where whoso gazes 
 
 Faints, entangled in their mazes. 
 
 Child of Light 1 thy limbs are burning 
 
 Through the vest which seems to hide them ; 
 
 As the radiant lines of morning 
 
 Through the clouds ere they divide them ; 
 
 And this atmosphere divinest 
 
 Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 
 
 Fair are others ! none beholds thee, 
 
 But thy voice sounds low and tender 
 
 Like the fairest, for it folds thee 
 
 From the sight, that liquid splendour, 
 
 And all feel, yet see 'thee never, 
 
 As I feel now, lost for ever ! 
 
 Lamp of earth ! where'er thou movest 
 
 Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, 
 
 And the souls of whom thou lovest 
 
 Walk upon the winds with brightness, 
 
 Till they fail, as I am failing, 
 
 Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing ! 
 
 The relation of man's soul to the world-soul, conceived by 
 the poet as Life, Light, Love, and Beauty, is defined with 
 more than usual precision in the following stanza from 
 ' Adonais.' Keats has died : 
 
 He is a portion of the loveliness 
 
 Which once he made more lovely ; he doth bear 
 
 His part, while the one spirit's plastic stress 
 
 Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there 
 
 Prometheus Unbound, Act ii., Scene 5.
 
 296 LANDSCAPE 
 
 All new successions to the forms they wear ; 
 Torturing the unwilling dross that checks its flight 
 To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 
 And bursting in its beauty and its might 
 From trees, and beasts, and men, into the heaven's light. 
 
 It is apparent that, for Shelley, the beauty which hunted 
 Alastor to his death on this earth, the beauty which in the 
 mind of Asia was as a keen flame shining through the 
 alabaster of the universe, has become the attribute of power, 
 vitality, continuous and all-pervasive energy. This is not 
 poetry borrowing the forms of pantheistic speculation, but 
 pantheism assuming to itself the faith and passion which 
 transmutes speculative thought into religion. To this under- 
 lying intuition of indwelling deity Shelley owes the magic 
 of his verse, whenever he deals directly with nature. Those 
 aerial conceptions of living creatures in the elements, the 
 ministry of the cloud, the wizardry of the west wind, the 
 sympathies of the sensitive plant, the incantations of the 
 Witch of Atlas, the raptures of the loves of earth and moon, 
 the daemon of the whirlwind, the chariot-races of the hours, 
 the primeval genii of Prometheus Unbound all these 
 creations of the poet's mythopoeic fancy are vitally connected 
 with the poet's belief in the universe as a manifestation of 
 spiritual force. For him it is not that subordinate divinities 
 fairies, angels, fiends, nymphs, fauns, and so forth exist 
 separately everywhere upon a slightly different plane from 
 that of human nature ; but everywhere, and in all things, in 
 plants and beasts and men and earth and sky, eternally 
 abides a genius and a spirit, whose particular epiphanies 
 constitute one moving whole, a stream of life, a po'os as the 
 Greek sage called it. ' All things pass, and nothing stays ; 
 the cosmos may be compared to the flow of a river, into 
 which it is impossible to plunge twice and find it the same 
 flood.' Yes : but the stream, though ever changing, is 
 perennially one ; and all things, including man, are drops 
 which go to make its continuity.
 
 LANDSCAPE 
 
 If we were aiming at completeness, now would be the time 
 to analyse the feeling for nature expressed by other poets of 
 this century : in England by Byron, Scott, Coleridge, Keats ; 
 by Tennyson, Eossetti, Swinburne, Arnold, Eoden Noel, 
 Browning, Morris. This is not necessary. The result would 
 hardly repay us for the tedium of the process. It will suffice 
 to bear in mind that, during the nineteenth century, a special 
 sensitiveness to landscape, varying in kind according to the 
 temperament of each individual, has been the note of all 
 our poets good, bad, and indifferent. The exaltation of 
 enthusiasm which distinguishes Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 appears rarely in their contemporaries and successors. Only 
 perhaps in Eoden Noel does the cult of nature rise to the 
 fervour-point of philosophical and religious inspiration. 
 Many critics will maintain that the poet is the better artist 
 when he does not philosophise his emotions ; that Scott and 
 Keats stand on a superior ground as landscape-painters to 
 Shelley and Wordsworth. Yet, however this point may be 
 settled, no one will deny the fact that literature in our age is 
 penetrated through and through with a sympathy for nature 
 which we do not find in the work of the last century, and 
 which culminates in the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 Eoden Noel. 
 
 To what extent painting has been directly influenced by 
 this enthusiasm admits of much debate. It cannot, however, 
 be doubted that the curiosity from which science sprang, and 
 which so powerfully stimulated our poets, affected painting 
 and controlled its practice. Artists, though they may not 
 be self-conscious with regard to the main currents of con- 
 temporary thought, are subject to its stress. They enjoy 
 one privilege denied to men of letters. Their vehicle of 
 expression excludes reasoning ; it offers them no inducement 
 to formulate vague longings and emotions which escape too 
 easily through language. Having to solve problems of com- 
 position, to study the forms of objects in their physical pre- 
 sentment, to grapple with technical difficulties of execution,
 
 298 LANDSCAPE 
 
 they dally not with metaphysic. Deeply as these men enjoy 
 the beauties of the world around us, subtly and profoundly 
 as they comprehend them with a far finer touch upon their 
 quality than those who have not sought to translate them 
 into pictures it is their duty and their pleasure to reproduce 
 aspects, not to penetrate mysteries. From the passion which 
 takes hold of poets and of mystics they are freed by the 
 conditions of their art, albeit they too may be mystics and 
 poets in the esoteric chambers of their soul. 
 
 The landscape-painter stands in the same relation to nature 
 as the sculptor to the nude. Praxiteles, modelling a Venus, 
 runs less risk of personal disturbance than the poet, lover of 
 beauty, shut up for hours together with a living woman in a 
 studio. 
 
 If this be the case, the founders of the modern schools of 
 landscape might repudiate the suggestion that their work is 
 in any way connected with the philosophical ideas which I 
 have analysed. Nevertheless, they were children of their age, 
 and obeyed its leading impulse. Art requires a spiritual 
 element to move in, and responds with elasticity to the con- 
 ditions of the faith men live by. So we may still regard 
 landscape-painting as a species vitally related to science, and 
 to religious mysticism modified by science. 
 
 The ideality of any art depends, as I have previously 
 attempted to demonstrate, upon the thoughts common to the 
 artist and his audience, which the former seeks to express. 
 Sculpture was congenial to the anthropomorphic mythology 
 of Hellas. Painting was congenial to the more emotional 
 mythology of mediaeval Christendom. These two arts drew 
 abundant ideality from these two spheres of thought. But 
 when a new religious sense arose in Europe when theistic 
 conceptions, especially among the northern races, lost that 
 sensuous concreteness which is adapted to sesthetical present- 
 ment then it was found that the capacities of painting were 
 by no means exhausted. The same art, obeying the thought- 
 stress of the moving age, lent its powers to the nascent 
 enthusiasm for nature. Pictures of saints and martyrs were 
 succeeded by pictures of the world we live in. Painting ceased
 
 LANDSCAPE 299 
 
 to be the handmaid of the Church, because the Church was 
 losing hold upon the intellect. She became in turn the friend 
 and teacher of generations for whom the earth was growing 
 daily more divine. Now, in the work of the landscape- 
 painters, spirit still speaks to spirit ; the spirit of the artist 
 who perceives, interprets, and preserves the beauty of earth, 
 sea, and sky, to the spirit of men ready to receive it. What 
 we owe to these hierophants of nature is incalculable. They 
 are continually training our eyes to see, our minds to under- 
 stand the world. They show how sympathy, emotion, passion, 
 thought may be associated with inanimate things for a 
 masterpiece of landscape-painting, like a symphony in music, 
 is penetrated with the maker's thought and feeling. Having 
 passed through the artist's intellect, the scene becomes trans- 
 figured into a symbol of what the artist felt. His subjectivity 
 inheres in it for ever after. 
 
 So vast is the field of nature, so comparatively little of 
 that field has as yet been subdued, that the resources of art 
 to be derived therefrom seem inexhaustible. Nor have we 
 any reason to apprehend that the religion of the future will 
 fail to supply this branch of art with ideality.
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 SOME who read these lines will perhaps remember that 
 enchanted region of Val Bregaglia, where the forest stretches 
 downward from Soglio to Castasegna, through several miles 
 of majesty and loveliness : the long aisles of secular chestnut- 
 trees interlacing their branches overhead, the golden weight 
 of foliage and fruit upon the boughs, the firm short sward and 
 yielding moss around gray venerable stems, the sun and 
 shadow falling on lilac crocuses and russet drift of scattered 
 leaves ; and, above all, the sculptured cliffs of Monte Zocco, 
 with Bondasca's snaky glaciers uplifted in the luminous 
 expanse of azure air, which separates those sphinxes of the 
 Alps from our verdurous haunt among the clustering trees. 
 
 In such a place, earth, the ancient mother, seems to enfold 
 man with loving-kindness and a soothing tenderness of beauty. 
 Yet those splintered mountains, older far than man or forest, 
 the frozen rivers and the waste of stones descending from their 
 girdle, the deep untroubled blue to which they rear their 
 javelin points of cloven granite, the limitless and living 
 atmosphere which softens them and makes the vision to our 
 eyes endurable all these things remind us of the unity in 
 nature, whereby in some mysterious manner our tranquil 
 pleasure in the woodland is linked with primeval forces far 
 away and unapproachable, yet ever near and active in our 
 being with the universal power that brought us into life, with 
 cosmic tumult and with order, with interstellar serenity and 
 gloom, with the everlasting clasp of God, who holds mankind 
 and mountains in the hollow of His hand and binds the fabric 
 of the world together in one vital whole.
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 301 
 
 Here I wandered one September morning; and, as it 
 chanced, a reprint of Blake's ' Marriage of Heaven and Hell ' 
 was in my pocket. Wishful to enjoy the scene and temper 
 my delight with meditation, I flung myself upon the grass 
 beneath an overshadowing tree, and read the sentences which 
 follow : 
 
 If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to 
 man as it is, infinite. 
 
 For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow 
 chinks of his cavern. 
 
 How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way, 
 
 Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five ? 
 
 One thought fills immensity. 
 
 What is now proved was once only imagined. 
 
 The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, 
 calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of 
 woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their 
 enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. 
 
 As I read, there happened to me something like that which 
 happened to Petrarch upon the summit of Mont Ventoux. 1 
 
 Blake's sentences, pregnant with mysticism, struck a deep 
 chord and chimed with thoughts which were already stirring 
 in me. For a while, I entered into spiritual union with nature, 
 and felt as though the genii of those giant chestnut-trees might 
 pace across the sward, or Pan appear, and saw that everything 
 is infinite, and knew the thought which fills immensity, and 
 hailed ' a world of delight ' in the hawk which hovered in the 
 azure depth of air above the glaciers of Bondasca. 
 
 Such moments do not last long, but they leave impressions 
 which contain the germs of future speculation. And so I have 
 written this account of a September morning in the woods of 
 Castasegna in order to introduce some reflections upon the 
 value, real or metaphorical, which mythology still possesses 
 in an age of scientific thought. 
 
 1 See above, p. 193.
 
 302 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 II 
 
 Minute attention has been paid to the origins of myths and 
 sagas ; but we have lost sight of their enduring symbolical 
 importance. Those ancient stories which our remote fore- 
 fathers held to be the sum and abstract of world-wisdom, 
 have been submitted to solar, meteorological, linguistic 
 explanations. Learned and ingenious scholars have resolved 
 them into tales about the sun and stars, the storms and 
 clouds, and also into a disease of language. These methods, 
 carried to extravagance, provoked a reaction of common sense, 
 and another school of students are now seeking less mechanical 
 solutions of the problem, by treating myths as relics of pre- 
 historic culture, custom, and religion. 
 
 Few have the temerity to regard mythology as a necessary 
 moment in human thought, the significance of which is by no 
 means exhausted. At a distant period, myths were certainly 
 ways of explaining the spiritual essence of the world and man 
 to the imagination. That essence must, except in symbol 
 and parable, remain for ever inscrutable and incognisable for 
 the human mind. It is therefore by no means proved that 
 the intuitions embodied in the myths of races like the Greek 
 are even now devoid of actuality. 
 
 Nature myths assume an indwelling spirit in the universe, 
 and express the sense of it by ascribing personality to inorganic 
 things and vegetables. Allegory myths attribute independent 
 existence to the moral and intellectual qualities of human 
 beings. In the antique polytheistic systems, notably in the 
 Hellenic, these two kinds were never wholly distinguished ; 
 for, when a natural object comes to be personified, the being 
 thus evolved assumes the properties of humanity. Further- 
 more, all polytheisms known to us are composite of still more 
 ancient creeds, combining divers elements of nature-worship 
 and moral allegory in heterogeneous admixture. Still, for the 
 purpose of analysis, the two species may be isolated, especially 
 as we can no longer treat of either from the purely religious 
 point of view. The utmost we can do is to raise the question 
 whether the myths of antiquity do not still supply a suggestive
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 303 
 
 way of regarding the universe as a spiritual whole, and man 
 in his relation to it as a part thereof. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Were they wholly fanciful, those myths and allegories of 
 the earliest philosophers and poets? The seers who gave 
 them form lived closer to all-nourishing earth than we do, 
 pent as we are in populous cities and clouded with the culture 
 of four thousand years. Perhaps they hold an element of 
 truth conveyed in symbol, to the significance of which we 
 have been blinded by theological exclusiveness, and by the 
 positive preoccupations of the scientific genius. Their truth, 
 if truth they had, lay in their recognition of the universe as 
 one live thing, and their belief in larger moral forces than 
 those of individual men and women. 
 
 We cannot return to the state of thought about the world, 
 out of which the primitive myths sprang. The habit of 
 attributing a personality like that of a man to everything in 
 nature belongs to the far distant past, and will not be revived. 
 But in its place the modern theory of the universe tends to 
 establish the conviction that men and beasts and plants and 
 inorganic substances are parts of one mind-penetrated unity. 
 That abrupt separation of men from their environment, 
 which formed the leading principle of philosophy and religion 
 during the last two thousand years, begins to disappear. We 
 recognise it as a necessary stage of thought, in the passage 
 from grosser to more refined conceptions of the spirit which 
 sustains and animates the hierarchy of being. We can 
 no longer deny our kinship with the lower lives wherefrom 
 we issued. 
 
 It is interesting to notice how the intuitions of early 
 thinkers tally with the last results of modern science. A poet 
 writing in the mystic East, six centuries ago, described the 
 ascent of man from nature in these verses : ' 
 
 First man appeared in the class of inorganic things 
 Next he passed therefrom into that of plants. 
 
 1 From the ' Mathnavi ' of Jalalu 'd Din.
 
 304 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 For years he lived as one of the plants, 
 
 Remembering nought of his inorganic state so different ; 
 
 And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state, 
 
 He had no remembrance of his life as a plant, 
 
 Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants, 
 
 Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers ; 
 
 Like the inclination of infants toward their mothers, 
 
 Which know not the cause of their inclination to the breast. 
 
 Again, the great Creator, as you know, 
 
 Drew man out of the animal into the human state. 
 
 Thus man passed from one order of nature to another, 
 
 Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now. 
 
 Of his first souls he has now no remembrance, 
 
 And he will be again changed from his present soul. 
 
 Jalalu 'd Din conceived evolution in a different way from 
 ours. But he arrived at the clear and logical conclusion that 
 man, having emerged from elements and plants and animals, 
 retains a sympathy with them, loves and admires and uses 
 them because they are the stock from which he sprang. 
 
 IV 
 
 Unless we reject what is implied in the evolutionary theory 
 of the Origin of Man, we are forced to concede that the old 
 Hellenic religion a religion which has survived in all imagina- 
 tive minds contained a truth neglected and down-trodden 
 by Christian theology. It rested on the following proposi- 
 tions. Not only man, but all things in the world, are full of 
 soul. Soul can communicate with soul, not only in its human 
 form, but also in nature ; man's soul with the soul of forces 
 that control his life, and with the soul of dimly sentient 
 things beneath him in the scale of being. Our contemplation 
 of the external universe is therefore not the mere inspection 
 of matter alien to ourselves, but a communion with that from 
 which we came and into which we go, itself penetrated with 
 the thought that constitutes our essence. Only, in the rhythm 
 of the universal life, it would appear that the creatures of each 
 stage, while in that stage, cannot overleap the barriers of their 
 defined personality, cannot mingle freely by sympathy and
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 305 
 
 understanding with the creatures of another stage. Man, so 
 long as he is man, has his most distinct affinities to man 
 alone, and is forced to think of spirit as human. This does 
 not, however, prevent him from entering into a sub-conscious 
 intercourse with beings which are not human, and from 
 recognising their essential spirituality. But when he does 
 this in faith and earnestness, he represents his sense of their 
 kinship with himself in terms of his own existence. To put 
 it otherwise, he feigns men and women in the objects of the 
 outer world the trees, the flowers, the stars, the rivers, and 
 the mountains. Their participation in the divine life, of which 
 he too is part, inevitably is expressed as personality, because 
 he knows himself to be a person. He cannot even escape 
 from thinking of God, or the spirit of the whole, as a person. 
 This may or may not correspond to the fact ; for what 
 personality is, we cannot define. It is only a term for denot- 
 ing the conditions under which alone consciousness is known 
 to us at present. And we are compelled, being what we call 
 persons, recognising personality as the sine qua non of our 
 conscious life, to find personality in natural things whenever 
 we confess their common essence with ourselves. 
 
 Thus, then, we obtain a theory for the validity of ancient 
 nature myths. The truth that they contained was the per- 
 ception of spirituality in the material world ; and though the 
 crude imagery (zoomorphic and anthropomorphic) in which 
 that truth was veiled may deprive them now of all but a 
 symbolical value, yet they claim reverent consideration in an 
 age which has to reappropriate their underlying principle. 
 
 Dryads, oreads, fauns, nymphs of wave and fountain, satyrs 
 and Pan, Narcissus, Hyacinth, and Clytia, are but forms found 
 for uttering man's sense of his affinity to woods and flowers 
 and waters. When the Greek boy saw the hamadryad step- 
 ping from her oak upon the anemone-starred sward around 
 it, he did not wholly indulge a vision or yield to an hallucina- 
 tion. The oak-tree has a life, a soul, a particle of the divine 
 aura, and with the recognition of this fact a nymph starts 
 from the graceful stem to greet the soul of child-like man. 
 When the Thessalian shepherd climbed at eve the crags of
 
 306 NATUEE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 (Eta, because he thought that Hesperus was calling to him 
 for his love, he did not wholly dream : for who has not known 
 the persuasions of the evening star, and dimly felt his heart 
 drawn forth to it with longing? We cannot behold hama- 
 dryads hurrying across the lawn, or astral gods leaning to us 
 from the saffron-tinted mountain crests. That way of feeling 
 the spirituality of nature and of expressing our sense of 
 affinity with natural things is perhaps for ever closed. It is 
 indeed probable that both hamadryad and ethereal Hesperus 
 were never seen except in reverie or pious act of faith by 
 Greeks. Yet surely our intellectual life will be richer, and 
 our intuition into the world will be truer, when we yield once 
 more to the belief upon which those myths were founded, 
 when we cease from standing aloof from nature and repelling 
 the constant spiritual intimations she is giving us. 
 
 Thus far I have been dealing with nature myths. For 
 those myths which may properly be called allegories, a similar 
 method of analysis can be adopted. But here the subject- 
 matter itself is different, and the inquiry will lead to other 
 considerations regarding the validity of ancient fables. I 
 shall seek to give some reasons why we should not so lightly 
 reject, as we are wont to do, those personified abstractions 
 which men of former ages drew from the substance of their 
 souls and called realities. 
 
 The essence of allegory consists in extracting some marked 
 portion of our psychology from its environments, and present- 
 ing it alone for contemplation. We think of wisdom solely, 
 or strength solely, or physical beauty solely ; but having 
 thought of these qualities in isolation, we are at once com- 
 pelled to clothe them with bodies and regard them as persons. 
 Human thought labours here under the same necessity as 
 when it expresses our sense of affinity with nature in the 
 forms of myth. When this step has been taken, the personage 
 brought into ideal being cannot be merely wise, or merely 
 strong, or merely beautiful. Together with personality, it
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 307 
 
 has put on the multiplicity of human attributes. Therefore 
 we obtain the complex deities called Pallas, Herakles, and 
 Aphrodite. The main abstraction to which they owe exist- 
 ence persists in them, and dominates their doings ; but in the 
 legends told about them other moral elements appear. The 
 fables of Pallas, Herakles, and Aphrodite teach how humanity 
 on a colossal scale, swayed severally by laws of wisdom, 
 strength, and beauty, will behave under conditions similar to 
 those of our experience what their vigour and their frailty 
 are, to what temptations they are subject, what special 
 advantages they enjoy, and what distinctive functions they 
 perform. Studying these moral qualities abstracted and 
 incarnate in the allegory or the god, man learns to compre- 
 hend their influences clearly, to recognise his own proclivities 
 and addictions with precision, to submit to those which attract 
 him, to shrink from those which repel. 
 
 There is an ideal truth in allegory of this kind ; and the 
 physical types which artists and poets have created to express 
 it are not fortuitous. We have, indeed, never seen a person 
 wholly wise, or wholly strong, or wholly beautiful. Yet the 
 thoughts of wisdom, strength, and beauty are present to us ; 
 and if these could take shape as human persons, they would 
 find a body corresponding to their spiritual essence. 
 
 To return to the paganism which worshipped these abstrac- 
 tions as deities would be impossible, and if it were possible it 
 would be undesirable. Until proof be gained of intermediate 
 gods, of angels and devils, of planetary powers and genii, we 
 do not need to hold the creations of our mind in superstitious 
 awe. Yet surely our moral life would be richer, our sense of 
 spiritual potencies would be more vivid, if we were in the 
 habit of inculcating lessons of conduct and discriminating the 
 several types to which we may assimilate ourselves by some 
 such striking examples as polytheism held up for imitation 
 and avoidance. The devotion of Hippolytus to Artemis was 
 not a vain thing ; nor was the need Orestes felt for purifica- 
 tion before his mother's Furies an idle fancy. To answer that 
 Artemis and the Furies were but the figments of antique 
 sages and poets avails little, for who shall contend that the 
 
 x2
 
 308 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 real people of Herodotus's history are more substantially 
 present to him than the fictitious people in Shakespeare's 
 plays ? So long as you can touch a man and hear him speak, 
 he differs indeed from the hero of an epic ; but the memory 
 of a man preserved in record differs little from the figment of 
 a man in living poetry. It may even be contended that King 
 Arthur of the story-books has exerted more solid influence 
 than ever did King Arthur in the flesh, and that Hamlet is 
 more philosophically effective than Democritus or Heraclitus. 
 In fact, it is impossible to preserve that hard and fast line 
 which the understanding is apt to draw between the person- 
 ages of actual existence and the personages of poetry, allegory, 
 and fable. Only as ideals, as typifying a spiritual quality 
 which endures and works for ever in the world of men, have 
 either any true importance. This is why some German critics 
 sought to prove that had Christ been but a myth, mankind 
 would not have been the poorer. 
 
 There is another point of view from which one might 
 defend the allegories contained in antique polytheistic 
 religions. Their ideal veracity consists in this, that the 
 spiritual qualities of humanity do not manifest themselves 
 in individuals alone, but in races, classes, congeries of men. 
 The race, the class, the community include and determine indi- 
 viduals in no less true a sense than that in which individuals 
 compose and constitute those larger aggregations. It is 
 therefore not only permissible but right and proper to regard 
 the broader species of spiritual qualities as abiding potencies, 
 external to the individual, claiming his homage or abhorrence 
 in other words, as the lords to which he is addicted, or the 
 tyrants against which he struggles. Lust dwells in this man's 
 heart ; but lust, in a far more formidable shape, is abroad in a 
 huge city. Are we logically justified in refusing actual exist- 
 ence to the holiness which conserved Israel, or to the lechery 
 which ruined Corinth V We need not be afraid lest we should 
 sap the roots of monotheism by attributing reality to the 
 collective vices and virtues of our common humanity. We 
 recognise the reality of vice and virtue in the individual; 
 why not therefore on a larger scale in the species and the
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 309 
 
 genus ? Catholic Christianity has remained monotheistic. 
 Yet it allows a hierarchy of angels, a hierarchy of devils, and 
 a whole multitude of saints, each one of whym personifies and 
 symbolises some specific form of moral excellence. I am not 
 contending, as I have already intimated, for the restitution of 
 polytheism in its cruder forms, for the belief in angels, saints, 
 and devils. I wish only to remind the present generation 
 that, just as the makers of nature myths had a clearer intui- 
 tion into the spirituality of the universe than we have now, 
 so the makers of allegorical myths had a more vivid sense 
 than we have of the spiritual potencies which surround us in 
 the collective moral atmosphere of humanity at large. 
 
 The chief defects of allegory in mediaeval and modern times 
 are due to the want of real belief in it by those who make it. 
 Neither Christianity nor science will suffer us to accept the 
 pagan point of view here any more than in the case of nature 
 myths. Instead, therefore, of forming an essential part of 
 religion, allegory is confined to poetry and plastic art, where 
 it has hitherto lacked substantiality and conviction. The 
 modern poet and the artist, though they treat of temperance 
 or sloth as personalities, imagine that they are but using 
 figures. They do not therefore put either their heart or their 
 faith into their creation. Yet if we could but come to think 
 of lust and anger, chastity and temperance, remorse and 
 revenge, forgiveness and repentance, not as mere abstractions 
 from ourselves, but as powers external to our soul, endowed 
 with penetrative force to influence our lives, this would 
 render the inner drama of the moral consciousness more 
 real and poignant. To do so with absolute belief in these 
 ideas as agencies independent of ourselves is perhaps im- 
 possible ; just as it is impossible to believe again in nymphs 
 and fauns. Polytheism cannot be resuscitated, and a recur- 
 rence to demonolatry would imply the abdication of the 
 reason. Still, in those points where art and poetry touch 
 ethics, it would be of benefit to humane culture if we could 
 resume the habit of contemplating the broader species of our 
 spiritual qualities in forms of personality adapted to their 
 several essences. Possibly the sculpture and the painting
 
 310 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 and the verse of the future may yet produce monumental 
 embodiments of vices and of virtues, through familiarity with 
 which posterity will sensibly learn how awful in ugliness are 
 the one kind, how awful in beauty are the other. What 
 right, moreover, have we, after all is said and done, to deny 
 that each collective vice and each collective virtue of humanity 
 may be a spiritual entity a something corresponding to 
 demonic or angelic essences ? It is difficult to see that any 
 harm should come to us, even though we submitted to regard 
 them as living potencies influencing mankind. 
 
 VI 
 
 Such speculations border the abyss of mysticism, and 
 require a more minute development than I can give them 
 here. It will be well in conclusion to recapitulate the points 
 wherein nature myths and allegory myths differ, and the 
 points they have in common. 
 
 The nature myth extracts spirit from the external world, 
 and invests that spirit with human personality in forms 
 appropriate to the impression made upon the human mind 
 by each particular object. The allegorical myth abstracts 
 from the human soul specific qualities, contemplates these as 
 objects, and while doing so is forced to provide them with 
 physical embodiments and personalities corresponding to their 
 spiritual essence. Man, so long as he is man, cannot think a 
 person except as both body and spirit. He cannot idealise 
 his own spiritual properties except as embodied. He cannot 
 detach the spirit he feels in tree or flower except as em- 
 bodied. His reason may assure him that this is a delusion. 
 Both Christianity and science may warn him off that path of 
 so-called falsehood. Christianity, indeed, by its lore of angels 
 and devils, has accepted the principle of allegorical myths, 
 while it rejects the nature myths as pagan. Science bids us 
 cast both aside, and in so far is more logical. Where Christi- 
 anity and science agree in condemning nature myths, they 
 do so at the expense of making men deaf and blind to the 
 inherent spirituality of the universe. All through the Middle
 
 311 
 
 Ages the best thinkers remained in the grossest ignorance 
 and darkness with regard to nature on account of the false 
 attitude forced upon them by theology. In modern times 
 materialism, which is perhaps the hollowest and shabbiest 
 idolum specils which has ever haunted the cavern of man's 
 intellect, owes its arrogance to a similar false attitude assumed 
 by physics. Yet dogmatic theology is losing its rigid grasp 
 upon the mind and heart of man, while science is leading us 
 back by circuitous routes to the primitive belief in a life- 
 penetrated universe. This being the case, we can indulge 
 the expectation that though the Hellenic point of view with 
 respect to myths of nature and of allegory may never be 
 resumed, yet we shall be able better in the future to appre- 
 ciate their value. Both poetry and art may be destined, on a 
 far more elevated platform and with far profounder assurance 
 of the truth, to use them both again for the illumination and 
 instruction of mankind. 
 
 VII 
 
 The arts are not bound to occupy themselves exclusively 
 with subjects of the present epoch. It is true that they are 
 exhorted to do so by critics who profess themselves indignant 
 with ' the idle singer of an empty day.' Such critics, how- 
 ever, have forgotten the treasures of old-world speculation, 
 the jewels of experience collected by our ancestors in times 
 when life was simpler, the types of ever-recurring tragedy and 
 ever-fresh emotion which lie embedded in primeval myths and 
 allegories. View them as we may, the thoughts of bygone 
 races, of men who laid the foundations of knowledge, who 
 first used language with a conscious purpose, who were closer 
 to the origins of life than we are, deserve reverent study by 
 all thinkers who accept man's emergence from the common 
 stuff of nature. They possess not merely an antiquarian or 
 an historic interest. They have something to say to us, which 
 we run the risk of ignoring in this positive age. 
 
 It is not in the cruder myths of savage tribes that 
 modern art can seek material for profitable treatment. These
 
 312 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 are too remote from our sympathies, although we recognise 
 their value as the first stage in the development of human 
 thought. We must not reject them as alien to ourselves, 
 or abhor them for their absurdities and indecencies. On 
 the contrary, it is our duty to use them as the keys to those 
 nobler forms of faith, which sprang up with the growth of 
 the progressive races. 
 
 The secondary stages of mythology, when it has become 
 the vehicle of thoughts and feelings essentially akin to ours, 
 without losing its elder sense of the divinity in nature, are 
 those which still abound in artistic motives of the highest 
 beauty. Erudition enables us to approach the repositories of 
 Oriental, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Semitic, Hellenic wisdom 
 with intelligent insight. Yet we stand far enough aloof from 
 them to be dominated by no religious preoccupations, and no 
 local or national predilections. By the aid of criticism we can 
 divest the legends of the world's young prime of their archaic 
 trappings, and can discern what they preserve of permanent 
 truth and durable instruction. Taste and sympathy reveal 
 the large and simple grandeur of their outlines, the depth and 
 universality of their emotion. 
 
 Examining a tale of Greek or Norse mythology, say the 
 story of Perseus or that of Balder, is like opening a sealed 
 jar of precious wine. Its fragrance spreads abroad through 
 all the palace of the soul ; and the noble vintage, upon being 
 tasted, courses through blood and brain with the matured elixir 
 of stored-up summers. 
 
 Goethe says that he was wont to carry the subjects of his 
 poems many years unspoken in his mind. By this means 
 they became a portion of himself, secretly drawing nourish- 
 ment from all that he experienced and learned upon the 
 paths of life. When the time came to give them utterance 
 and form, it was found that they suggested more than at the 
 first glance met the ear and eye. They had acquired a many- 
 sidedness, a vitality, a power of varied application, from their 
 lengthy sojourn in secluded chambers of his consciousness. 
 Myths have the same incommensurable and inexhaustible 
 potency. Having slumbered for generations in the thought
 
 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 313 
 
 of mighty races, when they sprang to light in their due season, 
 they were endowed with virtues far beyond their seeming. 
 Pregnancy is the note of a true myth. The stuff of man's self 
 has been absorbed and wrought into its substance by a process 
 so analogous to growth, that the more we seek to fathom it 
 the more we find there. The very quaintness of each detail 
 is suggestive, capable of divers applications, fit for varied uses. 
 The wisdom it presents in symbolic shape has been so worn 
 into harmony with human needs and human experience, that 
 it cannot lose its value till the end of time. 
 
 Our artists, whether poets, painters, or musicians, are there- 
 fore right to employ the legends of past ages for the expression 
 of thoughts and emotions belonging to the present. If used 
 with true imaginative insight, there is no cause to fear lest the 
 strain of modern adaptation should destroy the mystic beauty 
 of the antique form. Myths, by reason of their symbolic 
 pregnancy and spontaneity of origin, are everlastingly elastic. 
 Thus Goethe found nothing fitter to his purpose than the 
 Faust legend, when he planned the drama of the nineteenth 
 century. Shelley poured his spirit of revolt and aspiration 
 into the legend of Prometheus. Wagner, wishing to create 
 a new musical drama, extracted material from the story of 
 Tannhauser, from Norse mythology, and from episodes of 
 the Arthurian cycle. William Morris combined the mystic 
 tales of many nations in his ' Earthly Paradise.' Tennyson 
 rehandled the substance of Malory's ' Morte d'Arthur.' 
 Landor touched the height of poetry in the tale of ' Khaicos,' 
 which transports us to a time when man might love a 
 Hamadryad. In the poem of Agamemnon's meeting with 
 Iphigeneia, he interpreted for modern minds the sublime 
 pathos of the allegory of Lethe. In each and all of these 
 instances, and in many more which might be mentioned, the 
 poet's instinct was a sound one. 
 
 For plastic art, myths and allegories are of even higher 
 value than for poetry. This is because they embody per- 
 manent ideas in sensuous form. They are therefore, by their 
 very essence, exactly of the quality which figurative art 
 demands. I need, at the present moment, only point to the
 
 314 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 
 
 use which two of our greatest English painters, Mr. Watts 
 and Mr. Burne-Jones, have made of this material. I think it 
 will be admitted that if we look for ideality in contemporary 
 English painting, we shall find this mainly in the work of 
 these two masters. And it is in the region of the myth and 
 allegory that both have brought their poetic qualities con- 
 spicuously to view. Mr. Burne-Jones, in particular, has 
 proved that it is possible to treat legends so familiar as that 
 of Perseus or the Sleeping Beauty, allegories so old as that 
 of the Days of Creation, mythical tales so trite as that of 
 Pan and Syrinx, with freshness and originality, evolving from 
 their kernel something which is vitally in sympathy with 
 modern thought. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The line of thought which I have followed in this essay 
 would have appeared preposterous and paradoxical a century 
 ago, when mythology was treated from the point of view of 
 Lempriere, and when the artistic handling of allegorical 
 themes proceeded upon imitation of Grseco-Boman or late 
 Renaissance work. It will probably find but scanty accept- 
 ance even now. Yet there are present conditions favourable 
 to its reception by tolerant minds which were lacking in the 
 immediate past. The revolution effected by the romantic 
 movement has delivered us from pseudo-classicism. At the 
 same time spirituality has been restored to the material 
 universe by science, which forces us to regard the cosmos 
 as a single whole, penetrated throughout with life-producing 
 energy.
 
 IS POETEY AT BOTTOM A CEITICISM 
 OF LIFE? 
 
 A REVIEW OF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S SELECTION 
 FROM WORDSWORTH. 1 
 
 IT is both interesting and instructive to hear what masters 
 of a craft may choose to say upon the subject of their art. 
 The interest is rather increased than diminished by the 
 limitation or the imperfection of their view, inseparable from 
 personal inclination, idiosyncrasy of genius, or absorbing 
 previous course of study. When Herrick exclaims, ' There's 
 no lust like to poetry ; ' when Goethe asserts, ' Die Kunst 
 ist nur Gestaltung ; ' when Shelley writes, ' Poetry is the 
 record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and 
 best minds,' we feel in each of these utterances too partial 
 to express a universal truth, too profound to be regarded as 
 a merely casual remark the dominating bias and instinctive 
 leanings of a lifetime. If, then, we remember that Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold is equally eminent as a critic and a poet, 
 we shall not be too much surprised to read the following 
 account of poetry given in the preface to his selection from 
 Wordsworth : 
 
 It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this : that poetry is at bottom 
 a criticism of life ; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and 
 beautiful application of ideas to life to the question : How to live. 
 
 At first sight this definition will strike most people as a 
 paradox. It would be scarcely less startling to hear, as 
 
 1 Poems of Wordsworth. Chosen and Edited by Matthew Arnold. 
 Golden Treasury Series. Macmillan, 1879.
 
 316 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 indeed we might perhaps hear from a new school of writers 
 upon art, that ' Criticism is at bottom the poetry of things,' 
 inasmuch as it is the critic's function to select the quintessential 
 element of all he touches, and to present that only in choice 
 form to the public he professes to instruct. Yet, when we 
 return to Mr. Arnold, and compare the passage above quoted 
 with the fuller expression of the same view upon a preceding 
 page, the apparent paradox is reduced to the proportions of a 
 sound and valuable generalisation : 
 
 Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound 
 application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. 
 I said that a great poet receives his distinctive character of superiority 
 from his application, under the conditions immutably fixed by the laws 
 of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, whatever 
 it may be, of the ideas 
 
 On man, on nature, and on human life, 
 which he has acquired for himself. 
 
 A vital element in this description of poetic greatness is the 
 further determination of the ideas in question as moral : 
 
 It is said that to call these ideas moral ideas is to introduce a strong 
 and injurious limitation. I answer that it is to do nothing of the kind, 
 because moral ideas are really so main a part of human life. The 
 question, how to live, is itself a moral idea ; and it is the question which 
 most interests every man, and with which, in some way or other, he is 
 perpetually occupied. 
 
 With the substance of these passages there are few who, after 
 mature reflection on the nature of poetry, will not agree. That 
 the weight of Mr. Arnold's authority should be unhesitatingly 
 given against what he calls the poetry of revolt and the poetry 
 of indifference to morals, is a matter for rejoicing to all who 
 think the dissemination of sound views on literature important. 
 It is good to be reminded at the present moment that Omar 
 Khayyam failed of true greatness because he was a reactionary, 
 and that Theophile Gautier took up his abode in what can 
 never be more than a wayside halting-place. From time 
 to time critics arise who attempt to persuade us that it does
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 317 
 
 not so much matter what a poet says as how he says it, and 
 that the highest poetical achievements are those which com- 
 bine a certain vagueness of meaning with sensuous melody 
 and colour of verbal composition. Yet, if one thing is proved 
 with certainty by the whole history of literature down to our 
 own time, it is that the self-preservative instinct of humanity 
 rejects such art as does not contribute to its intellectual 
 nutrition and moral sustenance. It cannot afford to continue 
 long in contact with ideas that run counter to the principles 
 of its own progress. It cannot bestow more than passing 
 notice upon trifles, however exquisitely finished. Poetry will 
 not, indeed, live without style or its equivalent. But style 
 alone will never confer enduring and cosmopolitan fame upon 
 a poet. He must have placed himself in accord with the 
 permanent emotions, the conservative forces of the race ; he 
 must have uttered what contributes to the building up of 
 vital structure in the social organism, in order to gain more 
 than a temporary or a partial hearing. Though style is an 
 indispensable condition of success in poetry, it is by matter, 
 and not by form, that a poet has to take his final rank. 
 
 Of the two less perfect kinds of poetry, the poetry of 
 revolt and the poetry of indifference, the latter has by far the 
 slighter chance of survival. Powerful negation implies that 
 which it rebels against. The energy of the rebellious spirit 
 is itself a kind of moral greatness. We are braced and 
 hardened by contact with impassioned revolutionaries, with 
 Lucretius, Voltaire, Leopardi. Something necessary to the 
 onward progress of mankind the vigour of antagonism, the 
 operative force of the antithesis is communicated by them. 
 They are in a high sense ethical by the exhibition of 
 hardihood, self-reliance, hatred of hypocrisy. Even Omar's 
 secession from the mosque to the tavern symbolises a neces- 
 sary and recurring moment of experience. It is, moreover, 
 dignified by the pathos of the poet's view of life. Meleager's 
 sensuality is condoned by the delicacy of his sentiment. 
 Tone counts for much in the poetry of revolt against morals. 
 It is only the Stratons, the Beccadellis, the Baudelaires, who, 
 in spite of their consummate form, are consigned to poetical
 
 318 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 perdition by vulgarity, perversity, obliquity of vision. But 
 the carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets 
 and rondeaux, the seeking after sound or colour without heed 
 for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure. The absolute 
 neglect which has fallen on the melodious Italian sonnet- 
 writers of the sixteenth century is due to their cult of art 
 for art's sake, and their indifference to the realities of life. 
 If we ask why Machiavelli's Mandragora is inferior to 
 Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, in spite of its 
 profound knowledge of human nature, its brilliant wit, its 
 irresistible humour, its biting satire, and its incomparably 
 closer workmanship, we can only answer that Shakespeare's 
 conception of life was healthy, natural, exhilarating, while 
 Machiavelli's, without displaying the earnestness of revolt, 
 was artificial, morbid, and depressing. The sympathies 
 which every great work of art stimulates tend in the case 
 of Shakespeare's play to foster, in the case of Machiavelli's 
 to stunt, the all-essential elements of social happiness and 
 vigour. In point of form, the Mandragora has better right 
 to be a classic comedy than the Merry Wives of Windsor. 
 But the application of ideas to life in it is so unsound and 
 so perverse that common sense rejects it; we tire of living 
 in so false a world. 
 
 Without multiplying instances, it can be affirmed, with no 
 dread of opposition, that all art, to be truly great art, to 
 be permanent and fresh and satisfying through a hundred 
 generations, to yield the bread and wine of daily sustenance 
 for men and women in successive ages, must be moralised 
 must be in harmony with those principles of conduct, that 
 tone of feeling, which it is the self-preservative instinct of 
 civilised humanity to strengthen. This does not mean that 
 the artist should be consciously didactic or obtrusively 
 ethical. The objects of ethics and of art are distinct. The 
 one analyses and instructs ; the other embodies and delights. 
 But since all the arts give form to thought and feeling, it 
 follows that the greatest art is that which includes in its 
 synthesis the fullest complex of thoughts and feelings. The 
 more complete the poet's grasp of human nature as a whole,
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 319 
 
 the most complete his presentation of life in organised com- 
 plexity, the greater he will be. Now the whole struggle of 
 the human race from barbarism to civilisation is one con- 
 tinuous effort to maintain and to extend its moral dignity. 
 It is by the conservation and alimentation of moral qualities 
 that we advance. The organisation of our faculties into a 
 perfect whole is moral harmony. Therefore artists who aspire 
 to greatness can neither be adverse nor indifferent to ethics. 
 In each case they proclaim their own inadequacy to the 
 subject-matter of their art, humanity. In each case they 
 present a maimed and partial portrait of their hero, man. 
 In each case they must submit, however exquisite their style, 
 however acute their insight, to be excluded from the supreme 
 company of the immortals. We need do no more than name 
 the chiefs of European poetry Homer, Pindar, ^Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere in 
 order to recognise the fact that these owe their superiority to 
 the completeness of their representation, to their firm grasp 
 upon the harmony of human faculties in large morality. It 
 is this which makes classical and humane literature convertible 
 terms. It is this which has led all classes and ages of men 
 back and back to these great poets as to their familiar friends 
 and teachers, ' the everlasting solace of mankind.' 
 
 While substantially agreeing with Mr. Arnold, it may be 
 possible to take exception to the form of his definition. He 
 lays too great stress, perhaps, on the phrases, application of 
 ideas, and criticism. The first might be qualified as mis- 
 leading, because it seems to attribute an ulterior purpose to 
 the poet ; the second as tending to confound two separate 
 faculties, the creative and the judicial. Plato's conception of 
 poetry as an inspiration, a divine instinct, may be nearer to 
 the truth. The application of ideas should not be too con- 
 scious, else the poet sinks into the preacher. The criticism of 
 life should not be too much his object, else the poet might as 
 well have written essays. What is wanted is that, however 
 spontaneous his utterance may be, however he may aim at 
 only beauty in his work, or ' sing but as the linnet sings,' his 
 message should be adequate to healthy and mature humanity.
 
 320 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 His intelligence of what is noble and enduring, his expression 
 of a full harmonious personality, is enough to moralise his 
 work. It is even better that he should not turn aside to com- 
 ment. That is the function of the homilist. We must learn 
 how to live from him less by his precepts, than by his 
 examples and by being in his company. It would no doubt 
 be misunderstanding Mr. Arnold to suppose that he estimates 
 poetry by the gnomic sentences conveyed in it, or that he 
 intends to say that the greatest poets have deliberately used 
 their art as the vehicle of moral teaching. Yet there is a 
 double danger in the wording of his definitions. On the one 
 hand, if we accept them too literally, we run the risk of 
 encouraging that false view of poetry which led the Byzantines 
 to prefer Euripides to Sophocles, because he contained a 
 greater number of quotable maxims ; which brought the 
 humanists of the sixteenth century to the incomprehensible 
 conclusion that Seneca had improved upon the Greek drama 
 by infusing more of sententious gravity into his speeches ; 
 which caused Tasso to invent an ex post facto allegory for the 
 Gerusalemme, and Spenser to describe Ariosto's mad Orlando, 
 the triumphant climax of that poet's irony, as ' a good 
 governor and a virtuous man.' On the other hand, there is 
 the peril of forgetting that the prime aim of all art is at 
 bottom only presentation. That, and that alone, distinguishes 
 the arts, including poetry, from every other operation of the 
 intellect, and justifies Hegel's general definition of artistic 
 beauty as 'Die sinnliche Erscheinung der Idee.' Poetry is 
 not so much a criticism of life as a revelation of life, a pre- 
 sentment of life according to the poet's capacity for observing 
 and displaying it in forms that reproduce it for his readers. 
 The poet is less a judge than a seer and reporter. If he 
 judges, it is as light falling upon an object, showing its 
 inequalities, discovering its loveliness, may be said to judge. 
 The greatest poet is not the poet who has said the best things 
 about life, but he whose work most fully and faithfully reflects 
 life in its breadth and largeness, eliminating what is accidental, 
 trivial, temporary, local, or transmuting simple motives into 
 symbols of the universal by his treatment. He teaches less
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 321 
 
 by what he inculcates than by what he shows ; and the truth 
 of Plato's above-mentioned theory is that he may himself be 
 unaware of the far-reaching lessons he communicates. From 
 Shakespeare we could better afford to lose the profound 
 remarks on life in Timon or Troilus and Crcssida, than the 
 delineation of Othello's passion. The speeches of Nestor in 
 the Iliad are less valuable than the portrait of Achilles ; 
 and what Achilles says about fame, heroism, death, and 
 friendship could be sooner spared than the presentment of 
 his action. 
 
 The main thing to keep in mind is this, that the world 
 will very willingly let die in poetry what does not contribute 
 to its intellectual strength and moral vigour. In the long 
 run, therefore, poetry full of matter and moralised wins the 
 day. But it must, before all else, be poetry. The application 
 of the soundest moral ideas, the finest criticism of life, will 
 not save it from oblivion, if it fails in the essential qualities 
 that constitute a work of art. Imagination, or the power to 
 see clearly and to project forcibly ; fancy, or the power to 
 flash new light on things familiar, and by their combination 
 to delight the mind with novelty; creative genius, or the 
 power of giving form and substance, life and beauty to the 
 figments of the brain ; style, or the power to sustain a flawless 
 and unwavering distinction of utterance; dramatic energy, 
 or the power to make men and women move before us 
 with self-evident reality in fiction ; passion, sympathy, 
 enthusiasm, or the power of feeling and communicating 
 feeling, of understanding and arousing emotion ; lyrical 
 inspiration, or the power of spontaneous singing- these are 
 among the many elements that go to make up poetry. 
 These, no doubt, are alluded to by Mr. Arnold in the clause 
 referring to ' poetic beauty and poetic truth.' But it is 
 needful to insist upon them, after having dwelt so long upon 
 the matter and the moral tone of poetry. No sane critic can 
 deny that the possession of one or more of these qualities in 
 any very eminent degree will save a poet from the neglect 
 to which moral revolt or indifference might otherwise con- 
 demn him. Ariosto's commonplaceness of feeling, Shelley's
 
 322 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 crude and discordant opinions, Leopardi's overwhelming 
 pessimism, Heine's morbid sentimentality, Byron's super- 
 ficiality and cynicism, are cloaked and covered by the saving 
 virtues of imagination, lyrical inspiration, poetic style, 
 humour, intensity and sweep of passion. The very greatest 
 poets of the world have combined all these qualities, together 
 with that sound humanity which confers upon them immortal 
 freshness. Of Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, ^Ischylus, Dante, 
 Virgil, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, it is only possible to 
 say that one or other element of poetic achievement has been 
 displayed more eminently than the rest, that one or other 
 has been held more obviously in abeyance, when we come to 
 distinguish each great master from his peers. But lesser men 
 may rest their claims to immortality upon slighter merits ; 
 and among these merits it will be found impossible to exclude 
 what we call form, style, and the several poetic qualities 
 above enumerated. To borrow a burlesque metaphor from 
 the Oxford schools, a poet may win his second-class on his 
 moral philosophy papers, if the others do not drag him 
 down below the level of recognition ; or he may win upon 
 his taste papers, if he has not been plucked in divinity. It 
 is only the supreme few whom we expect to be equally good 
 all round. Shelley and Leopardi have, perhaps, the same 
 prospect of survival on their artistic merits as Wordsworth on 
 the strength of his moral ideas. 
 
 It will be seen that we have now arrived at Mr. Arnold's 
 attempt to place Wordsworth among the European poets 
 of the last two centuries. Omitting Goethe and living men, 
 it seems, to Mr. Arnold, indubitable that to Wordsworth 
 belongs the palm. This distinction of being the second 
 greatest modern poet since the death of Moliere is awarded 
 to Wordsworth on his moral philosophy paper. 'Where, 
 then, is Wordsworth's superiority ? It is here : he deals with 
 more of life than they do ; he deals with life, as a whole, 
 more powerfully.' There is some occult fascination in the 
 game of marking competitors for glory, and publishing class- 
 lists of poets, artists, and other eminent persons. For myself, 
 I confess that it seems about as reasonable to enter Words-
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 323 
 
 worth, Dryden, Voltaire, Leopardi, Klopstock, and all the 
 rest of them for the stakes of poetical primacy, and to 
 announce with a flourish of critical trumpets that Wordsworth 
 is the winner, as to run the moss-rose against the jessamine, 
 carnation, clematis, crown imperial, double daisy, and other 
 favourites of the flower-garden. Lovers of poets and of 
 flowers will have their partialities ; and those who have best 
 cultivated powers of reflection and expression will most 
 plausibly support their preference with arguments. There 
 the matter ends ; for, both in the case of the poets and the 
 flowers, the qualities which stimulate our several admirations 
 are too various in kind to be compared. Mr. Arnold has 
 undoubtedly given excellent reasons for the place he assigns 
 to Wordsworth. But it is dangerous for Wordsworth's 
 advocate to prove too much. He has already gained a firm, 
 a permanent, an honourable place upon the muster-roll of 
 English poets. Why undertake the task of proving him the 
 greatest ? Parnassus is a sort of heaven, and we know what 
 answer was given to the sons of Zebedee. 
 
 The final test of greatness in a poet is his adequacy to 
 human nature at its best ; his feeling for the balance of sense, 
 emotion, will, intellect in moral harmony ; his faculty for 
 regarding the whole of life, and representing it in all its 
 largeness. If this be true, dramatic and epical poetry must 
 be the most enduring, the most instructive monuments of 
 creative genius in verse. These forms bring into quickest 
 play and present in fullest activity the many-sided motives 
 of our life on earth. Yet the lyrist has a sphere scarcely 
 second in importance to that of the epic and dramatic poets. 
 The thought and feeling he expresses may, if his nature be 
 adequate, embrace the whole gamut of humanity ; and if his 
 expression be sufficient, he may give the form of universality 
 to his experience, creating magic mirrors wherein all men 
 shall see their own hearts reflected and glorified without 
 violation of reality or truth. Wordsworth's fame will rest 
 upon his lyrics, if we extend the term to include his odes, 
 sonnets, and some narrative poems in stanzas on these, ^and 
 on a few of his meditative pieces in blank verse. His long 
 
 Y2
 
 philosophical experiments the ' Prelude,' the ' Excursion ' 
 will be read for the light they cast upon the poet's mind, 
 and for occasional passages of authentic inspiration. Taken 
 as a whole, they are too unequal in execution, too imperfectly 
 penetrated with the vital spirit of true poetry, to stand the 
 test of time or wake the enthusiasm of centuries of students. 
 Those, then, who love and reverence Wordsworth, for whom 
 from earliest boyhood he has been a name of worship, will 
 thank the delicate and sympathetic critic who has here 
 collected Wordsworth's masterpieces in the compass of three 
 hundred pages. They will also thank him for the preface 
 in which he has pointed out the sterling qualities of 
 Wordsworth's poetry. After speaking of Wordsworth's debt 
 to Burns, who first in a century of false taste used 'a 
 style of perfect plainness, relying for effect solely on the 
 weight and force of that which with entire fidelity it 
 utters,' Mr. Arnold introduces the following paragraph as 
 to Wordsworth's handling of that style : 
 
 Still Wordsworth's use of it has something unique and unmatchable. 
 Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to 
 write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises 
 from two causes : from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth 
 feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural 
 character of his subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject 
 with nothing but the most plain, first-hand, almost austere naturalness. 
 His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of 
 ' Revolution and Independence ' ; but it is as bald as the bare mountain- 
 tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. 
 
 This is assuredly the truest and finest description which 
 has yet been written of Wordsworth's manner at its best ; 
 and the account rendered of the secret of his charm is no less 
 to the point : ' Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the 
 extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy 
 offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple 
 elementary affections and duties, and because of the extra- 
 ordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us 
 this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.' At the 
 same time Mr. Arnold recognises the poet's inequalities, and
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 325 
 
 the critical importance of his essay consists mainly in the 
 broad and clear distinction he has made between what is 
 more and less valuable in his work. ' In Wordsworth's case, 
 the accident, for so it may almost be called, of inspiration is 
 of peculiar importance. No poet, perhaps, is so evidently 
 filled with a new and sacred energy when the inspiration is 
 upon him ; no poet, when it fails him, is so left "weak as 
 is a breaking wave." ' The object, therefore, of Mr. Arnold is 
 ' to disengage the poems which show his power, and to present 
 them to the English-speaking public and to the world.' 
 He thinks that the volume ' contains everything, or nearly 
 everything, which may best serve him with the majority of 
 lovers of poetry, nothing which may disserve him.' Tastes 
 will differ considerably about both clauses of this sentence ; 
 for while Words worthians may complain that too much has 
 been omitted, others who are anxious that our great and 
 beloved poet should appear before the world with only his 
 best singing robes around him, may desire an even stricter 
 censorship than Mr. Arnold's. In the second lyric, 'To a 
 Butterfly,' we find this stanza : 
 
 Float near me ; do not yet depart ! 
 
 Dead times revive in thee : 
 
 Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art, 
 
 A solemn image to my heart, 
 
 My father's family ! 
 
 No excellence of moral sentiment can redeem the banality 
 of these lines. The last verse, sincerely felt as it may be, 
 respectable as is the emotion it expresses, is from the point of 
 view of art a bathos. A really fine narrative, the ' Brothers,' 
 contains abundance of writing which, were it not Words- 
 worth's, might be described, in the favourite phrase of ' tenth- 
 rate critics,' as prose cut into lengths of ten syllables : 
 
 And now, at last 
 
 From perils manifold, with some small wealth 
 Acquired by traffic 'mid the Indian isles, 
 To his paternal home he is returned, 
 With a determined purpose to resume 
 The life he had lived there.
 
 326 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 This is bald ; but it is not ' bald as the bare mountain-tops 
 are bald.' It is bald as a letter of introduction is bald, bald 
 as the baldest passages of Crabbe. Can we expect Italians, 
 accustomed to the grandly simple manner of Leopardi's 
 country poems, to accept this ? Or choose another example 
 from a ballad called the ' Power of Music ' : 
 
 An Orpheus ! An Orpheus I yes, Faith may grow bold, 
 And take to herself all the wonders of old ; 
 Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same 
 In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name. 
 
 This is neither bald nor yet genuine ; it begins with a conceit, 
 and the epithet applied to the Pantheon is uncouth in its 
 falseness. Can we expect our American cousins to tolerate 
 the style of this opening stanza for the sake of the noble 
 democratic spirit which breathes through the poem? The 
 ' Character of the Happy Warrior ' is both conceived and 
 written in the poet's stateliest mood ; yet it halts at intervals 
 on lines like these : 
 
 But makes his moral being his prime care .... 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 Her feeling, rendered more compassionate. 
 
 Will Frenchmen, habituated to look for sustained evenness 
 of style in composition, recognise the ' Happy Warrior ' as 
 a classic? These examples introduce a grave matter for 
 consideration. No lover of Wordsworth could desire the 
 exclusion of the ' Brothers,' or the ' Power cf Music,' or the 
 ' Happy Warrior,' from a selection of his poetry, however 
 willingly they might leave the 'Butterfly' alone. Yet the 
 failure of perfect art in these three fine poems must prove an 
 obstacle to their final acceptance by readers who make no 
 national, or what Mr. Arnold would call provincial, allowance 
 for Wordsworth. No such allowances are demanded by the 
 work of Keats or Shelley, when subjected to an equally 
 rigorous process of sifting, as that applied to Wordsworth in 
 this volume. 
 
 Still if, after study of the greatest literatures of Europe,
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 327 
 
 we feel convinced that Wordsworth is a classic, it does not 
 greatly signify what other nations now think about him. As 
 nothing can confer world-wide celebrity on an inferior pcet, 
 however popular at home, so nothing can prevent a classic 
 from attaining his right place in the long run. There is 
 something slightly ridiculous in waiting upon French opinion, 
 and expressing gratitude to M. Henry Cochin or to any other 
 foreign critic for a sensible remark upon Shakespeare. How- 
 ever, as the question has been started whether Wordsworth is 
 likely to become a poet of cosmopolitan fame, it is worth 
 while to consider what these chances are. Mr. Arnold, com- 
 paring him with the acknowledged masters of the art in 
 Europe, comes to the conclusion that he has ' left a body of 
 poetical work superior in power, in interest, in the qualities 
 which give enduring freshness, to that which any of the 
 others has left.' What these qualities are we have already 
 seen. It is the superior depth, genuineness, sincerity, and 
 truth of Wordsworth's humanity, the solid and abiding 
 vigour of his grasp upon the realities of existence, upon the 
 joys that cannot be taken from us, upon the goods of life 
 which suffer no deduction by chance and change, and are 
 independent of all accidents of fortune, that render Words- 
 worth's poems indestructible. He is always found upon the 
 side of that which stimulates the stored-up moral forces of 
 mankind. If I remember rightly, he says that he meant 
 his works ' to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to day- 
 light, by making the happy happier, to teach the young 
 and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and 
 therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous.' 
 This promise he has kept. When he touches the antique, it 
 is to draw from classic myth or history a lesson weighty with 
 wisdom applicable to our present experience. ' Laodamia ' 
 has no magic to compete with the ' Bride of Corinth ' ; but 
 we rise from its perusal with passions purified by terror and 
 compassion. ' Dion ' closes on this note : 
 
 Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends, 
 Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends, 
 Whose means are fair and spotless a.s his ends.
 
 328 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 When he writes a poem on a flower, it is to draw forth 
 
 thoughts of joy or strength, or consolation. His ' Daffodils ' 
 
 have not the pathos which belongs to Herrick's, nor has he 
 
 composed anything in this style to match the sublimity of 
 
 Leopardi's ' Ginestra.' But Leopardi crushes the soul of 
 
 hope out of us by the abyss of dreadful contemplation into 
 
 which the broom upon the lava of Vesuvius plunges him. 
 
 Wordsworth never does this. The worst that can be said of 
 
 him is that, as Mr. Swinburne said in a preface to Byron, he 
 
 shreds Nature's vegetables into a domestic saucepan for daily 
 
 service. Still the homely pot au feu of the moralist has no 
 
 less right to exist than a wizard's cauldron of sublimity, and 
 
 probably will be found to last and wear longer. Wordsworth 
 
 has said nothing so exquisite as Poliziano upon the fragility 
 
 of rose-leaves, nor has he used the rose, like Ariosto, for 
 
 similitudes of youthful beauty. But the moralising of these 
 
 Italian amourists softens and relaxes. Wordsworth's poems 
 
 on the Celandine brace and invigorate. His enthusiasms are 
 
 sober and solid. Excepting the ode on Immortality, where 
 
 much that cannot be proved is taken for granted, and excepting 
 
 an occasional exaggeration of some favourite tenet, as in this 
 
 famous stanza 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 
 Of moral evil, and of good, 
 Than all the sages can 
 
 his impulsive utterances are based on a sound foundation, 
 and will bear the test both of experience and analysis. In 
 this respect he differs from Shelley, whose far more fiery and 
 magnetic enthusiasms do not convince us of their absolute 
 sincerity, and are often at variance with probability. In the 
 case of Shelley we must be contented with the noble, the 
 audacious ardour he communicates. The further satisfaction 
 of feeling that his judgments are as right as his aspirations 
 are generous, is too frequently denied. Wordsworth does not 
 soar so high, nor on so powerful a pinion, but he is a safer 
 guide. His own comparison between the nightingale and the 
 stock-dove might be used as an allegory of the two poets.
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 329 
 
 Their several addresses to the skylark give some measure of 
 their different qualities. 
 
 The tone of a poet, the mood he communicates, the atmo- 
 sphere he surrounds us with, is more important even than 
 what he says. This tone is the best or the worst we get from 
 him ; it makes it good or bad to be with him. Now it is 
 always good to be with Wordsworth. His personality is like 
 a climate at once sedative and stimulative. I feel inclined 
 to compare it to the influence of the high Alps, austere but 
 kindly, demanding some effort of renunciation, but yielding 
 in return a constant sustenance, and soothing the tired nerves 
 that need a respite from the passions and the fever of the 
 world. The landscape in these regions, far above the plains 
 and cities where men strive, is grave and sober. It has none 
 of the allurements of the south no waving forests, or dancing 
 waves, or fretwork of sun and shadow cast by olive branches 
 on the flowers. But it has also no deception, and no languor, 
 and no decay. In autumn the bald hillsides assume their 
 robes of orange and of crimson, faintly, delicately spread 
 upon the barren rocks. The air is singularly clear and lucid, 
 suffering no illusion, but satisfying the sense of vision with a 
 marvellous sincerity. And when winter comes, the world for 
 months together is clad in flawless purity of blue and white, 
 with shy, rare, unexpected beauty shed upon the scene from 
 hues of sunrise or sunset. On first acquaintance this Alpine 
 landscape is repellent and severe. We think it too ascetic 
 to be lived in. But familiarity convinces us that it is good and 
 wholesome to abide in it. We learn to love its reserve even 
 more than the prodigality of beauty showered on fortunate 
 islands where the orange and the myrtle flower in never- 
 ending summer. Something of the sort is experienced by 
 those who have yielded themselves to Wordsworth's influence. 
 The luxuriance of Keats, the splendour of Shelley, the 
 oriental glow of Coleridge, the torrid energy of Byron, though 
 good in themselves and infinitely precious, are felt to be less 
 permanent, less uniformly satisfying, less continuously bracing, 
 than the sober simplicity of the poet from whose ruggedness 
 at first we shrank.
 
 330 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 It is a pity that Wordsworth could not rest satisfied in 
 leaving this tone to its natural operation on his readers ' in a 
 wise passiveness.' He passes too readily over from the poet 
 to the moraliser, clenching lessons which need no enforcement 
 by precepts that remind us of the preacher. This leads to a 
 not unnatural movement of revolt in his audience, and often 
 spoils the severe beauty of his art. We do not care to have 
 a somewhat dull but instructive episode from ordinary village 
 life interrupted by a stanza of admonition like the following : 
 
 O Reader ! had you in your mind 
 
 Such stores as silent thought can bring, 
 
 gentle Reader ! you would find 
 
 A tale in everything. 
 
 What more I have to say is short, 
 
 And you must kindly take it : 
 
 It is no tale ; but, should you think, 
 
 Perhaps a tale you'll make it. 
 
 After this the real pathos of ' Simon Lee ' cannot fail to 
 fall somewhat flat. And yet it is not seldom that Words- 
 worth's didactic reflections contain the pith of his sublimest 
 poetry. Beautiful as the tale of the ' White Doe ' is 
 aesthetically, it can bear the closing stanzas of precept : 
 
 Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well ; 
 Small difference lies between thy creed and mine : 
 This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell ; 
 His death was mourned by sympathy divine. 
 
 The Being, that is in the clouds and air, 
 That is in the green leaves among the groves, 
 Maintains a deep and reverential care 
 For the unoffending creatures whom he loves. 
 
 The Pleasure-house is dust : behind, before, 
 There is no common waste, no common gloom ; 
 But Nature, in due course of time, once more 
 Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. 
 
 She leaves these objects to a slow decay, 
 That what we are, and have been, may be known 
 But, at the coming of the milder day, 
 These monuments shall all be overgrown.
 
 A CEITICISM OF LIFE? 331 
 
 Up to this point the application of moral ideas has been 
 made with perfect success. The artistic charm has not been 
 broken. But the last stanza falls into the sermonising style, 
 as though the poet's inspiration failed him, and a pedagogue, 
 with no clear conception of the unalterable order of the 
 material universe, had taken his place : 
 
 One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, 
 
 Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals, 
 
 Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. 
 
 The tone I have attempted to describe, as of some clear 
 upland climate, at once soothing and invigorating, austere 
 bat gifted with rare charms for those who have submitted 
 to its influence, this tone, unique in poetry, outside the 
 range, perhaps, of Scandinavian literature, will secure for 
 Wordsworth, in England at any rate, an immortality of love 
 and fame. He is, moreover, the poet of man's dependence 
 upon Nature. More deeply, because more calmly, than 
 Shelley, with the passionate enthusiasms of youth subdued 
 to the firm convictions of maturity, he expressed for modern 
 men that creed which, for want of a better word, we designate 
 as Pantheism, but which might be described as the inner soul 
 of Science, the bloom of feeling and enthusiasm destined to 
 ennoble and to poetise our knowledge of the world and of 
 ourselves. In proportion as the sciences make us more 
 intimately acquainted with man's relation to the universe, 
 while the sources of life and thought remain still inscrutable, 
 Wordsworth must take stronger and firmer hold on minds 
 which recognise a mystery in Nature far beyond our ken. 
 What Science is not called on to supply, the fervour and the 
 piety that humanise her truths, and bring them into harmony 
 with permanent emotions of the soul, may be found in all 
 that Wordsworth wrote. 
 
 The time might come, indeed may not be distant, when 
 lines like those which I have quoted above (p. 291) from the 
 poem composed at Tintern Abbey should be sung in hours 
 of worship by congregations for whom the ' cosmic emotion ' 
 is a reality and a religion.
 
 332 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 
 
 Wordsworth, again, is the poet of the simple and the 
 permanent in social life. He has shown that average human 
 nature may be made to yield the motives of the noblest 
 poems, instinct with passion, glowing with beauty, needing 
 only the insight and the touch of the artist to disengage them 
 from the coarse material of commonplace. 
 
 The moving accident is not my trade : 
 To freeze the blood I have no ready arts : 
 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, 
 To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts. 
 
 Should the day arrive when society shall be remodelled 
 upon principles of true democracy, when ' plain living and 
 high thinking ' shall become the rule, when the vulgarity of 
 manners inseparable from decaying feudalism shall have 
 disappeared, when equality shall be rightly apprehended and 
 refinement be the common mark of humble and wealthy 
 homes should this golden age of a grander civilisation dawn 
 upon the nations, then Wordsworth will be recognised as the 
 prophet and apostle of the world's rejuvenescence. He, too, 
 has something to give, a quiet dignity, a nobleness and lofti- 
 ness of feeling joined to primitive simplicity, the tranquillity 
 of self-respect, the calm of self-assured uprightness, which it 
 Would be very desirable for the advocates of fraternity and 
 equality to assimilate. Of science and democracy Words- 
 worth in his lifetime was suspicious. It is almost a paradox 
 to proclaim him the poet of democracy and science. Yet 
 there is that in his work which renders it congenial to the 
 mood of men powerfully influenced by scientific ideas, and 
 expecting from democracy the regeneration of society at no 
 incalculably distant future. 
 
 After all, Wordsworth is essentially an English poet. He 
 has the limitations no less than the noble qualities of the 
 English character powerfully impressed upon him. Shelley 
 brought into English literature a new ideality, a new element 
 of freedom and expansion. Mazzini greeted Byron with 
 enthusiastic panegyric as the poet of emancipation. Words- 
 worth moves in a very different region from that of either
 
 A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 333 
 
 Byron or Shelley. He remains a stiff, consistent, immitigable 
 Englishman ; and it may be questioned whether his stubborn 
 English temperament, his tough insular and local personality, 
 no less than a certain homeliness in his expression, may not 
 prove an obstacle to his acceptance as a cosmopolitan poet. 
 I find a curious note on British literature in the ' Democratic 
 Vistas ' of Walt Whitman, a portion of which, though it is 
 long, may here be not unprofitably cited : 
 
 I add that, while England is among the greatest of lands in politica 
 freedom, or the idea of it, and in stalwart personal character, &c., the 
 spirit of English literature is not great at least, is not greatest and its 
 products are no models for us. With the exception of Shakespeare, there 
 is no first-class genius, or approaching to first-class, in that literature 
 which, with a truly vast amount of value and of artificial beauty (largely 
 from the classics), is almost always material, sensual, not spiritual 
 almost always congests, makes plethoric, not frees, expands, dilates is 
 cold, anti-democratic, loves to be sluggish and stately, and shows much 
 of that characteristic of vulgar persons, the dread of saying or doing 
 something not at all improper in itself, but unconventional, and that may 
 be laughed at. In its best, the sombre pervades it it is moody, 
 melancholy, and to give it its due, expresses in characters and plots 
 these qualities in an unrivalled manner. Yet not as the black thunder- 
 storms, and in great normal, crashing passions, as of the Greek 
 dramatists clearing the air, refreshing afterward, bracing with power ; 
 but as in Hamlet, moping, sick, uncertain, and leaving ever after a 
 secret taste for the blues, the morbid, the luxury of woe. 
 
 This is a severe verdict to be spoken by one whose main 
 interest in life appears to be the building up of American 
 personality by means of great literature. To the Americans, 
 destined to be by far the most numerous of ' the English- 
 speaking public,' our poetry cannot remain a matter of 
 indifference, nor can their criticism of it be passed over by us 
 with neglect. They are in the unique position of possessing 
 our language as their mother tongue, and at the same time of 
 contemplating our literature from a point of view that is the 
 opposite of insular. Comparing English poetry with the 
 spirit of the American people, whom he knows undoubtedly 
 far better than the refined students of Boston, Walt Whitman 
 comes to the conclusion that there is but little in it that will
 
 334 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 
 
 suit their needs or help them forward on the path of their 
 development. Yet I cannot but think that, had he read 
 Wordsworth, he would have made at least a qualified excep- 
 tion in his favour. 1 Wordsworth is not ' sombre, moody, 
 melancholy,' is certainly not afraid of the ' unconventional,' 
 does not borrow ' artificial beauty ' from the classics or else- 
 where. In fact, the faults here found with English poetry 
 in general are contradicted in an eminent degree by his best 
 poetry. But, though this seems clear enough, it remains true 
 that in Wordsworth we find a ponderosity, a personal and 
 patriotic egoism, a pompousness, a self-importance in dwelling 
 upon details that have value chiefly for the poet himself or for 
 the neighbourhood he lives in, which may not unnaturally 
 appear impertinent or irksome to readers of a different 
 nationality. Will the essential greatness of Wordsworth, 
 whereof so much has been already said, his humanity, his 
 wisdom, his healthiness, his bracing tone, his adequacy to 
 the finer inner spirit of a scientific and democratic age 
 will these solid and imperishable qualities overcome the 
 occasionally defective utterance, the want of humour and 
 lightness, the obstinate insularity of character, the somewhat 
 repellent intensity of local interest, which cannot but be found 
 in him? 
 
 1 This I gather from the modification of the above passage in favour 
 of ' the cheerful ' name of Walter Scott.
 
 IS MUSIC THE TYPE OE MEASUEE OF 
 ALL AET? 
 
 MB. MATTHEW ABNOLD'S definition of Poetry as ' at bottom 
 a Criticism of Life,' insisted somewhat too strenuously on 
 the purely intellectual and moral aspects of art. There is a 
 widely different way of regarding the same subject-matter, 
 which finds acceptance with many able thinkers of the present 
 time. This ignores the criticism of life altogether, and dwells 
 with emphasis upon sensuous presentation, emotional sugges- 
 tion, and technical perfection, as the central and essential 
 qualities of art. In order to steer a safe course between the 
 Scylla of excessive intellectuality and the Charybdis of 
 excessive sensuousness, it will be well to examine what a 
 delicate and philosophical critic has published on this second 
 theory of the arts. With this object in view, I choose a 
 paper by Mr. Walter Pater on ' The School of Giorgione.' l 
 The opinion that art has a sphere independent of intellectual 
 or ethical intention is here advocated with lucidity, singular 
 charm of style, and characteristic reserve. 
 
 Mr. Pater opens the discussion by very justly condemning 
 the tendency of popular critics ' to regard all products of art 
 as various forms of poetry.' 'For this criticism,' he says, 
 ' poetry, music, and painting are but translations into different 
 languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative 
 thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour 
 in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry.' 
 ' In this way,' he adds, ' the sensuous element in art, and 
 with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, October 1887.
 
 336 IS MUSIC THE TYPE 
 
 made a matter of indifference.' He then proceeds to point 
 out that each of the fine arts has its own sphere, its own 
 untranslatable mode of expression, its own way of reaching 
 the imaginative reason through the senses, its own special 
 responsibilities to its material. 
 
 So far, every intelligent student of the subject will agree 
 with him. Nor will there be any substantial difference of 
 opinion as to the second point on which he insists namely, 
 that each of the arts, while pursuing its own object, and obey- 
 ing its own laws, may sometimes assimilate the quality of a 
 sister-art. This, adopting German phraseology, Mr. Pater terms 
 the Anders-streben of an art, or the reaching forward from its 
 own sphere into the sphere of another art. We are familiar 
 with the thought that Greek dramatic poetry borrowed some- 
 thing of its form from sculpture, and that the Italian romantic 
 epic was determined to a great extent by the analogy of 
 painting. Nor is it by any means an innovation in criticism 
 to refer all the artistic products of a nation to some dominant 
 fine art, for which that nation possessed a special aptitude, 
 and which consequently gave colour and complexion to its 
 whole esthetical activity. Accordingly, Mr. Pater, both in 
 the doctrine of the independence of each art, and also in the 
 doctrine of the Anders-streben of one art toward another, 
 advances nothing which excites opposition. 
 
 At this point, however, he passes into a region of more 
 questionable speculation. Having rebuked popular criticism 
 for using poetry as the standard whereby to judge the arts, he 
 proceeds to make a similar use of music ; for he lays it down 
 that all the arts in common aspire ' towards the principle of 
 music, music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the 
 object of the great Anders-streben of all art, of all that is 
 artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.' 
 
 The reason for this assertion is stated with precision : ' 
 
 All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while 
 in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the 
 form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is 
 the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a 
 
 Fortnightly Review, p. 528. The italics are Mr. Pater's.
 
 OR MEASURE OF ALL ART? 337 
 
 poem, for instance, its subject, its given incidents or situation ; that 
 the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the 
 actual topography of a landscape, should be nothing without the form, 
 the spirit of the handling ; that this form, this mode of handling, should 
 become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter ; 
 this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different 
 degrees. 
 
 Having illustrated the meaning of this paragraph by refer- 
 ences to painting, poetry, furniture, dress, and the details of 
 daily intercourse, Mr. Pater proceeds as follows : l 
 
 Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere 
 intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its 
 responsibilities to its subject or material ; the ideal examples of poetry and 
 painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composi- 
 tion are so welded together that the material or subject no longer strikes 
 the intellect only ; nor the form, the eye or ear only ; but form and 
 matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the 
 imaginative reason, that complex faculty for which every thought and 
 feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol. 
 
 It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic 
 ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter, this strange 
 chemistry, uniting, in the integrity of pure light, contrasted elements. 
 In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the 
 means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression ; they 
 inhere in and completely saturate each other ; and to it, therefore, to 
 the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed 
 constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, not poetry, as is so often 
 supposed, is the true type or measure of consummate art. Therefore, 
 although each art has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable 
 order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the imaginative 
 reason, yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after 
 the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone com- 
 pletely realises ; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, 
 dealing with the concrete products of art, new or old, is to estimate the 
 degree in which each of those products approaches in this sense to 
 musical law. 
 
 If this means that art, as art, aspires toward a complete 
 absorption of the matter into the form toward such a 
 blending of the animative thought or emotion with the 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, p. 530.
 
 338 IS MUSIC THE TYPE 
 
 embodying vehicle that the shape produced shall be the only 
 right and perfect manifestation of a spiritual content to the 
 senses, so that, while we contemplate the work, we cannot 
 conceive their separation then in this view there is nothing 
 either new or perilous. It was precisely this which consti- 
 tuted the consummate excellence of Greek sculpture. The 
 sculptor found so apt a shape for the expression of ideal 
 personality, that his marble became an apocalypse of god- 
 hood. It was precisely this, again, which made the poetry of 
 Virgil artistically perfect. In the words of the most eloquent 
 of Virgil's panegyrists : ' What is meant by the vague praise 
 bestowed on Virgil's unequalled style is practically this, that 
 he has been, perhaps, more successful than any other poet in 
 fusing together the expressed and the suggested emotion ; 
 that he has discovered the hidden music which can give to 
 every shade of feeling its distinction, its permanence, and its 
 charm ; that his thoughts seem to come to us on wings of 
 melodies prepared for them from the foundation of the 
 world.' l 
 
 But it does not seem that Mr. Pater means this only. We 
 have the right to conclude from passages which may be 
 emphasised, that he has in view the more questionable notion 
 that the fine arts in their most consummate moments all 
 aspire toward vagueness of intellectual intention that a 
 well-defined subject in poetry and painting and sculpture is 
 a hindrance to artistic quality that the delight of the eye or 
 of the ear is of more moment than the thought of the brain. 
 Art, he says, is 'always striving to be independent of the 
 mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception 
 to get red of its responsibilities to its subject or material.' 
 ' Lyrical poetry,' he says, ' just because in it you are least 
 able to detach the matter from the form without a deduction 
 of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, 
 the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very 
 perfection of such poetry often seems to depend in part on a 
 certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the 
 
 1 ' Essays, Classical,' by F. W. H. Myers, p. 115.
 
 OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ? 339 
 
 definite meaning almost expires, or reaches us through ways 
 not distinctly traceable by the understanding.' l 
 
 This is ingenious ; and it cannot be denied that the theory 
 has a plausible appearance. Yet, were we to carry Mr. 
 Pater's principles to their logical extremity, we should have 
 to prefer Pope's ' Verses by a Person of Quality ' to the 
 peroration of the ' Dunciad,' and a noble specimen of 
 Japanese screen-painting to Turner's Te"meraire or Raphael's 
 School of Athens. 
 
 So far as the art of poetry goes, he seems to overstate a 
 truth which is finely and exactly expressed by Mr. Myers in 
 the essay on Virgil from which I have already quoted. The 
 passage is long ; but it puts so well the point which Mr. 
 Pater has perhaps exaggerated, regarding the importance of 
 the sensuous and suggestive elements in poetry, that I venture 
 to think my readers will be glad to be reminded of it : 2 
 
 The range of human thoughts and emotions greatly transcends the 
 range of such symbols as man has invented to express them; and it 
 becomes, therefore, the business of Art to use these symbols in a double 
 way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and 
 feeling ; but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as 
 to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing. And 
 this can be done ; for experience shows that it is possible so to arrange 
 forms, colours, and sounds as to stimulate the imagination in a new and 
 inexplicable way. This power makes the painter's art an imaginative 
 as well as an imitative one ; and gives birth to the art of the musician, 
 whose symbols are hardly imitative at all, but express emotions which, 
 till music suggests them, have been not only unknown, but unimaginable. 
 Poetry is both an imitative and an imaginative art. As a choice and 
 condensed form of emotional speech, it possesses the reality which 
 depends on its directly recalling our previous thoughts and feelings. 
 But as a system of rhythmical and melodious effects not indebted for 
 then* potency to their associated ideas alone it appeals also to that 
 mysterious power by which mere arrangements of sound can convey an 
 emotion which no one could have predicted beforehand, and which no 
 known laws can explain. 
 
 And, indeed, in poetry of the first order, almost every word (to use 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, p. 529. Here the italics are not Mr. Pater's, 
 but mine. 
 
 2 ' Essays, Classical,' pp. 113-115. 
 
 z2
 
 340 IS MTTRIC THE TYPE 
 
 a mathematical metaphor) is raised to a higher power. It continues 
 to be an articulate sound and a logical step in the argument ; but 
 it becomes also a musical sound and a centre of emotional force. It 
 becomes a musical sound that is to say, its consonants and vowels are 
 arranged to bear a relation to the consonants and vowels near it a 
 relation of which accent, quantity, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration 
 are specialised forms, but which may be of a character more subtle 
 than any of these. And it becomes a centre of emotional force ; that 
 is to say, the complex associations which it evokes modify the associa- 
 tions evoked by other words in the same passage in a way quite distinct 
 from grammatical or logical connection. The poet, therefore, must 
 avoid two opposite dangers. If he thinks too exclusively of the music 
 and the colouring of his verses of the imaginative means of suggesting 
 thought and feeling what he writes will lack reality and sense. But 
 if he cares only to communicate definite thought and feeling according 
 to the ordinary laws of eloquent speech, his verse is likely to be deficient 
 in magical and suggestive power. 
 
 This is right. This makes equitable allowance for the 
 claims alike of the material and the form of art the intel- 
 lectual and emotional content, the sensuous and artificial 
 embodiment. 
 
 But to return to Mr. Pater. His doctrine that art is 
 ' always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence,' 
 his assertion that the perfection of lyrical poetry ' often seems 
 to depend in part on a certain suppression or vagueness of 
 mere subject,' contradict the utterances of the greatest crafts- 
 men in the several arts Milton's sublime passages on the 
 function of Poetry ; Sidney's and Shelley's Defences of Poesy ; 
 Goethe's doctrine of ' the motive ' ; Eossetti's canon that 
 ' fundamental brain- work ' is the characteristic of all great 
 art ; Michel Angelo's and Beethoven's observations upon their 
 own employment of sculpture and music. Eigidly applied, 
 his principles would tend to withdraw art from the sphere of 
 spirituality altogether. Yet, considered as paradoxes, they 
 have real value, inasmuch as they recall attention to the 
 sensuous side of art, and direct the mind from such antagonistic 
 paradoxes as the one propounded by Mr. Matthew Arnold in 
 his preface to Wordsworth. 
 
 It is difficult to see in what way Mr. Pater can evade the 
 strictures he has passed upon his brethren, the popular critics.
 
 OR MEASURE OP ALL ART? &Al 
 
 Whether a man selects poetry or selects music as the 'true 
 type or measure of consummate art,' to which 'in common 
 all the arts aspire,' will depend doubtless partly upon personal 
 susceptibilities, and partly upon the theory he has formed 
 of art in general. Both the popular critics and Mr. Pater 
 take up their position upon equally debatable ground. The 
 case stands thus. Mr. Pater is of opinion that the best 
 poetry is that in which there is the least appeal to 'mere 
 intelligence,' in which the verbal melody and the suggestive 
 way of handling it are more important than the intellectual 
 content. He thinks that the best pictures are those in which 
 the ' mere subject ' is brought into the least prominence. 
 Holding these views, he selects music as the ' true type and 
 measure of consummate art.' Herein he is consistent; for 
 music, by reason of its limitations, is the least adapted of 
 all arts for the expression of an intellectual content. The 
 popular critic, on the other hand, is of opinion that the best 
 poetry is that which has the clearest, the most human, and 
 the most impressive motive. He thinks that the best pictures 
 are those which, beside being delightful by their drawing and 
 colour, give food for meditation and appeal to mental faculty. 
 Holding these views, he selects poetry as the ' true type and 
 measure of consummate art.' Herein he too is consistent; 
 for poetry, by reason of its limitations, is the best adapted of 
 all arts for appealing to intelligence and embodying motives 
 with lucidity. 
 
 Mr. Pater and the popular critic are equally right or 
 equally wrong. We are, in fact, confronting two different 
 conceptions of art, each of which is partial and one-sided, 
 because the one insists too strongly on the sensuous form, the 
 other on the mental stuff, of art. 
 
 Suppose a man does not accept Mr. Pater's doctrine ; 
 supposing he starts from another point of view, and demands 
 some defined conception in a work of art as well as a sensuous 
 appeal to our imaginative reason; supposing he regards art 
 in its highest manifestation as a mode of utterance for what 
 is spiritual in man, as a language for communicating the ideal 
 world of thought and feeling in sensible form ; then he will
 
 342 IS MUSIC THE TYPE 
 
 be tempted to select not music but poetry as his type and 
 measure. Thus it is manifest that critics who refer to the 
 standard of poetry, and critics who refer to the standard of 
 music, differ in this mainly that they hold divergent theories 
 regarding the function of art in general. 
 
 The debatable point for consideration is whether either the 
 popular critic rebuked by Mr. Pater or Mr. Pater himself can 
 legitimately choose one of the arts as the ' type and measure ' 
 for the rest. I maintain that both are expressing certain 
 personal predilections, whereby the abiding relations of the 
 arts run some risk of being overlooked. What the matter 
 really comes to is this : while the one proclaims his preference 
 for sensuous results, the other proclaims a preference for 
 denned intelligible content. Each does violence by his selec- 
 tion to one or other of the arts. The critic who demands a 
 meaning at any cost, will find it hard to account for his 
 appreciation of music or of architecture. Mr. Pater, in order 
 to complete his theory, is forced to depreciate the most 
 sublime and powerful masterpieces of poetry. In his view 
 drama and epic doff their caps before a song, in which verbal 
 melody and the communication of a mood usurp upon 
 invention, passion, cerebration, definite meaning. 
 
 Just as the subjectivity of any age or nation erects one art 
 into the measure of the rest, so the subjectivity of a particular 
 critic will induce him to choose poetry or music, or it may be 
 sculpture, as his standard. The fact remains that each art 
 possesses its own strength and its own weakness, and that no 
 one of the arts, singly and by itself, achieves the whole purpose 
 of art. That purpose is to express the content of human 
 thought and feeling in sensuously beautiful form by means of 
 various vehicles, imposing various restrictions, and implying 
 various methods of employment. If we seek the maximum 
 of intelligibility, we find it in poetry ; but at the same time 
 we have here the minimum of immediate effect upon the 
 senses. If we seek the maximum of sensuous effect, we find 
 it in music ; but at the same time we have here the minimum 
 of appeal to intelligence. Architecture, in its inability to 
 express definite ideas, stands next to music ; but its sensuous
 
 OR MEASURE OF ALL ART? 343 
 
 influence upon the mind is feebler. As a compensation, it 
 possesses the privilege of permanence, of solidity of impressive 
 magnitude, of undefinable but wonder-waking symbolism. 
 Sculpture owes its power to the complete and concrete pre- 
 sentation of human form, to the perfect incarnation of ideas 
 in substantial shapes of bronze or stone, on which light and 
 shadows from the skies can fall : this it alone of all the arts 
 displays. It has affinities with architecture on the one hand, 
 owing to the material it uses, and to poetry on the other, 
 owing to the intelligibility of its motives. Painting is remote 
 from architecture ; but it holds a place where sculpture, poetry, 
 and music let their powers be felt. Though dependent on 
 design, it can tell a story better than sculpture ; and in this 
 respect painting more nearly approaches poetry. It can 
 communicate a mood without relying upon definite or strictly 
 intelligible motives ; in this respect it borders upon music. 
 Of all the arts, painting is the most flexible, the most mimetic, 
 the most illusory. It cannot satisfy our understanding like 
 poetry ; it cannot flood our souls with the same noble 
 sensuous joy as music ; it cannot present such perfect and 
 full shapes as sculpture ; it cannot affect us with the sense of 
 stability or with the mysterious suggestions which belong to 
 architecture. But it partakes of all the other arts through its 
 speciality of surface-delineation, and adds its own delightful 
 gift of colour, second in sensuous potency only to sound. 
 
 Such is the prism of the arts ; each distinct, but homo- 
 geneous, and tinctured at their edges with hues borrowed from 
 the sister-arts. Their differences derive from the several 
 vehicles they are bound to employ. Their unity is the 
 spiritual substance which they express in common. Abstract 
 beauty, the iSe'o, TOV xaXov, is one and indivisible. But the 
 concrete shapes which manifest this beauty, decompose it, 
 just as the prism analyses white light into colours. ' Multas 
 terricolis linguae ccelestibus una.' 
 
 It is by virtue of this separateness and by virtue of these 
 sympathies that we are justified in calling the poetry of 
 Sophocles or Landor, the painting of Michel Angelo or Man- 
 tegna, the music of Gluck or Cherubim, sculpturesque ; Loren-
 
 344 IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ? 
 
 zetti's frescoes and Dante's 'Paradise,' architectural; Tin- 
 toretto's Crucifixion and the Genius of the Vatican, poetical ; 
 Shelley's lyrics in Prometheus Unbound and Titian's Three 
 Ages, musical ; the fa9ade of the Certosa at Pa via, pictorial ; 
 and so forth, as suggestion and association lead us. 
 
 But let it be remembered that this discrimination of an 
 Anders- streben in the arts, is after all but fanciful. It is at 
 best a way of expressing our sense of something subjective 
 in the styles of artists or of epochs, not of something in the 
 arts themselves. Let it be still more deeply remembered 
 that if we fix upon any one art as the type and measure for 
 the rest, we are either indulging a personal partiality, or else 
 uttering an arbitrary, and therefore inconclusive, sesthetical 
 hypothesis. The main fact to bear steadily in mind is that 
 beauty is the sensuous manifestation of the idea that is, of 
 the spiritual element in man and in the world and that the 
 arts, each in its own way, conveys this beauty to our per- 
 cipient self. We have to abstain on the one hand from any 
 theory which emphasises the didactic function of art, and on 
 the other from any theory, however plausible, which diverts 
 attention from the one cardinal truth : namely, that fine and 
 liberal art, as distinguished from mechanical art or the arts 
 of the kitchen and millinery, exists for the embodiment of 
 thought and emotion in forms of various delightfulness, 
 appealing to what has been called the imaginative reason, 
 that complex faculty which is neither mere understanding 
 nor mere sense, by means of divers sensuous suggestions, and 
 several modes of concrete presentation.
 
 SOME five years ago there appeared a little volume, named 
 ' Ros Eosarum ex Horto Poetarum,' and bearing upon its 
 title-page the well-known initials of E. V. B., under which 
 the Hon. Mrs. Richard Cavendish Boyle has given several 
 works of combined literary and artistic merit to the world. 
 This volume is an anthology culled from the poetry of all 
 languages and ages upon the theme of the rose. To make 
 such a collection at once complete would have been 
 almost impossible ; and a book not quite complete, like Mrs. 
 Boyle's ' Ros Rosarum,' has the advantage of suggestiveness 
 and stimulation to the fancy of the reader, which an exhaustive 
 anthology of rose-literature would have failed to convey. 
 
 Studying its pages with close attention, I observed that 
 Mrs. Boyle had omitted two important passages in Latin 
 poetry which may be regarded as the twin fountain-heads of 
 a large amount of verses written upon roses in the modern 
 world. On turning to Catullus and Ausonius and comparing 
 the passages in question with some stanzas by Poliziano, 
 Ariosto, Tasso, Guarini, Spenser, Herrick, Waller, Ronsard, 
 and other modern poets, I was so much struck with the 
 examples of literary derivation they afforded, that I composed 
 the following essay, which I now present as an attempt to 
 study the forms of hybridism in poetry. 
 
 The first of the two passages in question occurs in the 
 second Epithalamium of Catullus : 
 
 Ut flos in sseptis secretus nascitur hortis, 
 Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro,
 
 346 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 Quern mulcent aurse, firmat sol, educat imber ; 
 Multi ilium pueri, multas optavere puellse : 
 Idem quom tenui carptus defloruit ungui, 
 Nulli ilium pueri, nullse optavere puellae : 
 Sic virgo dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est, 
 Quom castum amisit pollute corpore florem, 
 Nee pueris jocunda manet, nee cara puellis. 
 
 It will be noticed that Catullus does not specialise the rose. 
 He speaks indifferently of a flower. But when we examine 
 the imitations of these lines by modern poets, we shall see 
 how their instinct appropriated to the rose the honours of 
 the suggestion. I may also point out that the poet dwells 
 only on the fact that a flower, up-growing on its native stalk, 
 nourished into bloom by the powers of nature, is desirable 
 to all who gaze upon it ; but when it has been plucked, the 
 cut flower raises no desire ; and so, Catullus says, it is with 
 maidens also. 
 
 For English readers I will roughly paraphrase these un- 
 translatable hexameters : 
 
 The flower that, closed by garden walls, doth blow, 
 Which no plough wounds, and no rude cattle know, 
 But breezes fan, sun fosters, showers shoot higher, 
 It many lads and many maids desire ; 
 The same, when cropped by cruel hand it fades, 
 No lads at all desire it, nor no maids : 
 E'en so the girl, so long her youth doth last 
 Untouched, on her kind friends affection cast ; 
 But when she stoops to folly, sheds her bloom, 
 For lads, for maids, hath flown her chaste perfume. 
 
 The second of the two classic passages to which I have 
 referred is an Idyll by Ausonius. This poet, who lived from 
 309 to 392 A.D., was half pagan and half Christian. His 
 genius floated in the atmosphere of the decaying Eoman 
 Empire, between influences of the past and future. But 
 what his religious creed was does not greatly signify. 
 As a writer, he expressed, at the latest close of antique 
 culture, something of the spirit which appears in mediaeval, 
 and which pervades modern literature, the spirit of sympathy
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 347 
 
 with nature, and the sense of pathos in ephemeral things. It 
 was Ausonius, then, who wrote the following Idyll on the 
 Rose : 
 
 Ver erat et blando mordentia frigora sensu 
 
 Spirabat croceo mane revecta dies. 
 Strictior Eoos praecesserat aura jugales, 
 
 ^Estiferum suadens anticipare diem. 
 Errabam riguis per quadrua compita in hortis, 
 
 Mature cupiens me vegetare die. 
 Vidi concretas per gramina flexa pruinas 
 
 Pendere, aut olerum stare cacuminibus ; 
 Caulibus et patulis teretes colludere guttas, 
 
 Et coelestis aquae pondere tune gravidas. 
 Vidi Psestano candere rosaria cultu, 
 
 Exoriente novo roscida Lucifero. 
 Bara pruinosis canebat gemma frutetis, 
 
 Ad primi radios interitura die. 
 Arnbigeres, raperetve rosis Aurora ruborem, 
 
 An daret, et flores tingeret orta dies. 
 Eos unus, color unus, et unum mane duorum, 
 
 Sideris et floris nam domina una Venus. 
 Forsan et unus odor : sed celsior ille per auras 
 
 Difflatur, spirat proximus ille magis. 
 Communis Paphie dea sideris et dea floris 
 
 Praecipit unius muricis esse habitum. 
 Momentum intererat, quo se nascentia florum 
 
 Germina comparibus dividerent spatiis. 
 Hoec viret angusto foliorum tecta galero : 
 
 Haec tenui folio purpura rubra notat. 
 Haac aperit primi fastigia celsa obelisci, 
 
 Mucronem absolvens purpurei capitis. 
 Vertice collectos ilia exsinuabat amictus, 
 
 Jam meditans foliis se numerare suis : 
 Nee mora, ridentis calathi patefecit honorem, 
 
 Prodens inclusi semina densa croci. 
 Hsec modo, que toto rutilaverat igne comarum 
 
 Pallida collapsis deseritur foliis. 
 Mirabar celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam, 
 Et, dum nascuntur, consenuisse rosas. 
 Ecce, et defluxit rutili coma punica floris, 
 
 Dum loquor, et tellus tecta rubore micat. 
 Tot species tantosque ortus variosque novatus 
 Una dies aperit, conficit una dies.
 
 348 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 Conquerimur, Natura, brevis quod gratia florum est ? 
 
 Ostentata oculis illico dona rapis. 
 Quam longa una dies, aetas tarn longa rosarum, 
 
 Quas pubescentes juncta senecta premit. 
 Quam modo nascentem rutilus conspexit Ecus, 
 
 Hanc rediens sero vespere vidit anum. 
 Sed bene, quod paucis licet interitura diebus, 
 
 Succedens sevum prorogat ipsa suum. 
 Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes, 
 
 Et memor esto sevum sic properare tuum. 
 
 In the course of our analysis we shall see what parts of this 
 Idyll were selected for imitation by modern poets, and what 
 parts they omitted. The beautiful imaginative lines (12-22) 
 in which the morning star and the rose are brought beneath 
 the common guardianship of Venus, have, so far as I know, 
 not been seized upon ; although one thought contained in 
 them, that possibly the star may be no less fragrant than the 
 flower, is very modern in its fancy. But first it will be well 
 to call attention to the fact that, while Catullus used the 
 flower of his metaphor only as a "symbol of virginity, Ausonius 
 enters into communion with the rose herself as a living creature. 
 For him the flower is no mere emblem. The reflections upon 
 human life which it suggests are only brought forward at the 
 conclusion of his poem, which, in its main structure, is 
 a studied picture of external objects lovingly observed. 
 Another point should be noticed. His sympathy with the 
 short bloom-time of the rose makes him draw from nature 
 pathos which he afterwards applies to man. Hitherto, in 
 classic literature, the rose had been a symbol of love and 
 gladness, celebrated as the ornament of Aphrodite, the pledge 
 of passion, and the chief decoration of life's banquet. In all 
 the authors who praised the rose, from Sappho to the false 
 Anacreon and Philcstratus, I remember none who dwelt with 
 insistence on its brevity of beauty. Writing even of dead 
 roses, the anonymous poet of the Anacreontics thinks of their 
 perfume. 
 
 Xapifv pdScav tie yrjpas 
 ve6rr]Tos ecr^ey oS/t^i-.
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 349 
 
 It remained for Ausonius, in the crepuscular interspace 
 between the sunset of the antique and the night which came 
 before the sunrise of the modern age, to develop thus 
 elaborately the motive of fragility in rose life and in human 
 loveliness. For English readers I have made a translation of 
 his Idyll, which may enable them 'as in a glass darkly ' to 
 perceive its subdued lustre. 
 
 'Twas spring, and dawn returning breathed new-born 
 
 From saffron skies the bracing chill of morn. 
 
 Before day's orient chargers went a breeze, 
 
 That whispered : Else, the sweets of morning seize ! 
 
 In watered gardens where the cross-paths ran, 
 
 Freshness and health I sought ere noon began : 
 
 I watched from bending grasses how the rime 
 
 In clusters hung, or gemmed the beds of thyme ; 
 
 How the round beads, on herb and leaf outspread, 
 
 Kolled with the weight of dews from heaven's height shed ; 
 
 Saw the rose-gardens in their Pastan bloom 
 
 Hoar 'neath the dawn-star rising through the gloom. 
 
 On every bush those separate splendours gleam, 
 
 Doomed to be quenched by day's first arrowy beam. 
 
 Here might one doubt : doth morn from roses steal 
 
 Their redness, or the rose with dawn anneal ? 
 
 One hue, one dew, one morn makes both serene ; 
 
 Of star and flower one Venus reigns the queen. 
 
 Perchance one scent have they ; the star's o'erhead 
 
 Far, far exhales, the flower's at hand is shed. 
 
 Goddess of star, goddess of rose no less, 
 
 The Paphian flings o'er both her crimson dress. 
 
 Now had the moment passed wherein the brood 
 
 Of clustering buds seemed one twin sisterhood. 
 
 This flower, enlaced with leaves, shows naught but green 
 
 That shoots a roseate streak from forth the screen : 
 
 One opes her pyramid and purple spire, 
 
 Emerging into plenitude of fire : 
 
 Another thrusts her verdant veil aside, 
 
 Counting her petals one by one with pride : 
 
 Expands her radiant cup of gorgeous hue, 
 
 And brings dense hidden veins of gold to view : 
 
 She who had burned erewhile, a flower of flame, 
 
 Now pales and droops her faulting head with shame : 
 
 So that I mused how swift time steals all worth, 
 
 How roses age and wither with their birth ;
 
 360 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 Yea, while I speak, the flower with crimson crowned 
 Hath fallen and shed her glories on the ground. 
 So many births, forms, fates with changes fraught, 
 One day begins and one day brings to naught ! 
 Grieve we that flowers should have so short a grace, 
 That Nature shows and steals her gifts apace ? 
 Long as the day, so long the red rose lasts ; 
 Eld following close on youth her beauty blasts : 
 That flower which Phosphor newly-born had known, 
 Hesper returning finds a wrinkled crone : 
 Yet well if, though some brief days past she die, 
 Her life be lengthened through posterity ! 
 Pluck roses, girl, when flower, when youth is new, 
 Mindful the while that thus time flies for you. 
 
 These, then, are the two Latin sources which I wish to 
 bring before the students of rose-literature in modern poetry. 
 One of them is a passage from a marriage song by Catullus, 
 the other an Idyll by Ausonius. I have next to show how, 
 after the revival of letters, they were severally or in combina- 
 tion used by European poets. In this part of my task I shall 
 not seek after exhaustiveness, but shall content myself with 
 such specimens as occur readily to the memory. 
 
 I said that the Greek and Latin poets of a good period 
 rarely used the rose as a symbol of human fragility. This 
 requires some modification. The myths connected with 
 flowers hyacinth, narcissus, anemone are themselves sug- 
 gestive of sadness ; but in these a god's beloved has become 
 a plant which blooms each year with the recurring season. 
 Therefore, this contemplation of the flower derives its senti- 
 ment rather from the promise of continuity and immortality 
 in nature, than from the pathos of temporal decay. The rose, 
 it may be parenthetically observed, in one version of the 
 death of Adonis, was said to have sprung from his blood, 
 the anemone from Aphrodite's tears. 1 
 
 Satcpua 8' a HcuJi/Tj, T/xfff 1 iitxffi, Sffffov''AScayis 
 aljua x* et ' T " 5e Trdvra trorl x^ovl ylyvtrcu &vQi\. 
 aljua poSov rtKrei, ret 5e tidtcpva 
 
 1 Bion's Lament for Adonis, 64-66. The lines are probably a late 
 interpolation,
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 351 
 
 Tears the Paphian shed, drop by drop for the drops of Adonis' 
 Blood, and on earth each drop, as it fell, grew into a blossom ; 
 Eoses sprang from the blood, and the tears gave birth to the wind- 
 flower. 
 
 Those beautiful similes, again, in which Homer and Virgil 
 likened a young man stricken by death upon the battlefield 
 to a poppy, or hyacinth, or olive broken from its stem, were 
 symbols, not of the short prime of beauty, but of its sudden 
 and unseasonable extinction ; nor was the rose, so far as I 
 remember, employed even in this way. That was reserved 
 for a modern poet, Ariosto, who compared the mouth of dying 
 Zerbino to a waning rose. 1 
 
 Languidetta come rosa, 
 Bosa non colta in sua stagione, si ch' ella 
 Impallidisca in su la siepe ombrosa. 
 
 Languid like a rose, 
 
 A rose not plucked in her due season, so 
 That she must fade upon the dim hedgerows. 
 
 Yet two passages may be noticed in which poets of a good 
 age compared the rose in her brief season to the fleeting 
 loveliness of youth. 2 
 
 Kal rb f>65ov KaX6v tffTi, Kal 6 \p6vos avrb /j.a.paivei ' 
 . Kal rb tov Ka\6v tffTiv iv fta.pi, Kal raxv 
 Ka\6v ffri rb iraiSiK6i> t a\\' 
 
 Fair is the rose, but time consumes her flower ; 
 Fan- the spring violet, but soon it fades ; 
 And fair is boyish beauty, but short-lived. 
 
 Ovid, perhaps with these lines in his memory, wrote as 
 follows : 3 
 
 Nee violas semper, nee hiantia lilia florent ; 
 
 Et viget amissa spina relicta rosa. 
 Et tibi jam cani venient, formose, capilli ; 
 Jam venient rugae quaa tibi corpus arent. 
 
 1 Orl. Fur. xxiv. 80. 
 
 2 Theocritus, Idyll xxiii. 29. This Idyll is probably not by Theocritus, 
 but by an imitator. 
 
 3 Ars Amandi, ii. 115.
 
 352 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 Not always violets nor lilies bloom ; 
 The sharp thorn bristles in the rose's room. 
 And thus for thee, fair boy, shall gray hairs grow, 
 While envious tune delves wrinkles on thy brow. 
 
 I might also quote an epigram of Eufinus to Khodocleia, 
 in which he bids her bind blossoms on her brow, reminding 
 her the while that : 
 
 avOfts Kal hfaeis Kal ffv Kal 6 arefyavos. 
 
 For tune fades thee as he fades the roses ; 
 Nor they nor thou may revive again. 
 
 Such, before the date of Ausonius, were the slender contribu- 
 tions of classic poets to the pathos of rose-literature. 
 
 With the revival of letters in the fifteenth century, the 
 passages from Catullus and Ausonius which I have chosen as 
 the themes for my discourse fell like seeds on fertile soil in 
 Italy, and bore abundant flowers of poetry, which spread their 
 perfume, afterwards, through Europe. The melancholy which 
 survived from mediaevalism at that epoch, and the vivid 
 interest in nature which characterised the Renaissance, com- 
 bined to draw the attention of scholar-poets to the Idyll of 
 Ausonius. This Idyll, or elegy, as it might better be called, 
 reappears, but slightly altered, and with some distinctive 
 additions, in the ' Corinto ' of Lorenzo de' Medici : 
 
 L' altra mattina in un mio piccolo orto 
 Andavo : e '1 sol sorgente con suoi rai 
 Uscia, non gia ch" io lo vedessi scorto. 
 
 Sonvi piantati dentro alcuni rosai ; 
 A quai rivolsi le mie vaghe ciglie 
 Per quel che visto non avevo mai. 
 
 Eranvi rose candide e vermiglie : 
 Alcuna a foglia a foglia al sol si spiega ; 
 Stretto prima, poi par s' apra scompiglie ; 
 
 Altra piu giovinetta si dislega 
 Appena dalla boccia : eravi ancora 
 Chi le sue chiuse foglie all' aer niega ; 
 
 Altra cadendo a pie il terreno inflora. 
 Cosi le vidi nascere e morire 
 E passar lor vaghezza in men d' un' ora. 
 
 Quando languenti e pallide vidi ire
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 353 
 
 Le foglie a terra, allor mi venne a mente 
 Che vana cosa e il giovenil fiorire. 
 
 Ogni arbore ha i suoi fiori : e immantinente 
 Poi le tenere frondi al sol si piegano 
 Quando rinnovellar 1' aere si sente. 
 
 I piccol frutti ancor informi allegano ; 
 Ch' a poco a poco talor tanto ingrossano, 
 Che pel gran peso i forti rami piegano, 
 
 Ne senza gran periglio portar possano 
 II proprio peso ; appena regger sogliono 
 Crescendo, ad or ad ora se 1' addossono. 
 
 Vien poi 1' autunno, e maturi si cogliono 
 I dolci pomi : e passato il bel tempo, 
 Di nor di frutti e fronde al fin si spogliono. 
 
 Cogli la rosa, o ninfa, or ch' e il bel tempo. 
 
 I will give my own English version of this piece : 
 
 Into a little close of mine I went 
 
 One morning, when the sun with his fresh light 
 
 Was rising all refulgent and unshent. 
 Rose-trees are planted there in order bright, 
 
 Whereto I turned charmed eyes, and long did stay, 
 
 Taking my fill of that new-found delight. 
 Bed and white roses bloomed upon the spray ; 
 
 One opened, leaf by leaf, to greet the morn, 
 
 Shyly at first, then in sweet disarray ; 
 Another, yet a youngling, newly born, 
 
 Scarce struggled from the bud, and there were some 
 Whose petals closed them from the air forlorn ; 
 Another fell, and showered the grass with bloom ; 
 
 Thus I beheld the roses dawn and die, 
 
 And one short hour their loveliness consume. 
 But while I watched those languid petals lie 
 
 Colourless on cold earth, I could but think 
 
 How vain a thing is youthful bravery. 
 Trees have their time to bloom on winter's brink ; 
 
 Then the rathe blossoms wither in an hour, 
 
 When the brief days of spring toward summer sink : 
 The fruit, as yet unformed, is tart and sour ; 
 
 Little by little it grows large, and weighs 
 
 The strong boughs down with slow persistent power 
 Nor without peril can the branches raise 
 
 Their burden ; now they stagger 'neath the weight 
 
 Still growing, and are bent above the ways ; 
 
 A A
 
 354 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 Soon autumn comes, and the ripe, ruddy freight 
 Is gathered : the glad season will not stay ; 
 Flowers, fruit, and leaves are now all desolate. 
 Pluck the rose, therefore, maiden, while 'tis May ! 
 
 Here we have the Collige virgo rosas, ' Gather ye roses 
 while ye may,' translated from the autumn of antique to the 
 April of modern poetry, and that note is echoed through all 
 the love-literature of the Renaissance. Lorenzo, be it 
 observed, has followed his model, not only in the close, but 
 also in the opening of the passage. Side by side with this 
 Florentine transcript from Ausonius I will now place Polizi- 
 ano's looser, but more poetical handling of the same theme, 
 subjoining my version of his ballata. 
 
 I' mi trovai, fanciulle, un bel mattino 
 
 Di mezzo maggio in un verde giardino. 
 Eran d' intorno violette e gigli 
 
 Fra 1' erba verde, e vaghi fior novelli, 
 Azurri gialli candidi e vermigli : 
 
 Ond' io porsi la mano a cor di quelli 
 
 Per adornar e' mie' biondi capelli 
 E cinger di grillanda el vago crino. 
 I' mi trovai, etc. 
 
 Ma poi ch' i' ebbi pien di fiori un lembo, 
 
 Vidi le rose e non pur d' un colore : 
 Io corsi allor per empier tutto el grembo, 
 
 Perch' era si soave il loro odore 
 
 Che tutto mi senti' destar el core 
 Di dolce voglia e d' un piacer divino. 
 I' mi trovai, etc. 
 
 I' posi mente : quelle rose allora, 
 
 Mai non vi potre' dir quant' eran belle : 
 Quale scoppiava della boccia ancora ; 
 Qual' erano un po' passe e qual novelle. 
 Amor mi disse allor : Va' co' di quelle 
 " Che piu vedi fiorite in sullo spino. 
 I' mi trovai, etc. 
 
 Quando la rosa ogni suo' foglia spande, 
 
 Quando e piu bella, quando e piu gradita ; 
 Allora e buona a mettere in ghirlande,
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 355 
 
 Prima che sua belleza sia fuggita : 
 Sicche, fanciulle, mentre e piu fiorita, 
 Coglian la bella rosa del giardino. 
 I' mi trovai, etc. 
 
 I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, 
 In a green garden in mid month of May. 
 
 Violets and lilies grew on every side 
 
 Mid the green grass, and young flowers wonderful, 
 Golden, and white, and red, and azure-eyed ; 
 
 Toward which I stretched my hands, eager to pull 
 
 Plenty to make my fair curls beautiful, 
 To crown my rippling curls with garlands gay. 
 
 I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, 
 In a green garden in mid month of May. 
 
 But when my lap was full of flowers I spied 
 Roses at last, roses of every hue ; 
 
 Therefore I ran to pluck their ruddy pride, 
 Because their perfume was so sweet and true 
 That all my soul went forth with pleasure new, 
 
 With yearning and desire too soft to say. 
 
 I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, 
 In a green garden in mid month of May. 
 
 I gazed and gazed. Hard task it were to tell 
 
 How lovely were the roses in that hour : 
 One was but peeping from her verdant shell, 
 
 And some were faded, some were scarce in flower. 
 
 Then Love said : Go, pluck from the blooming bower 
 Those that thou seest ripe upon the spray. 
 
 I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, 
 In a green garden in mid month of May. 
 
 For when the full rose quits her tender sheath, 
 
 When she is sweetest and most fair to see, 
 Then is the time to place her in thy wreath, 
 
 Before her beauty and her freshness flee. 
 
 Gather ye therefore roses with great glee, 
 Sweet girls, or e'er their perfume pass away. 
 
 I went a-roaming, maidens, one bright day, 
 In a green garden in mid month of May. 
 
 AA2
 
 356 THE PATHOS OF THE HOSE IN POETRY 
 
 Much might be written about the different styles in 
 which Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano severally treated the 
 theme suggested to them by Ausonius. Lorenzo is minute 
 in detail, sober in reflection ; Poliziano employs slighter 
 touches with an airier grace and freer flight of fancy. The 
 one produces a careful study from nature by the light of his 
 classical model ; the other sings a new song, soaring high 
 above the beaten track of imitation. The description of 
 the rose-garden, of the roses in their several degrees of expan- 
 sion, and the concluding moral, have been all etherealised in 
 the ballata. But space forbids me to enter into further critical 
 particulars. 
 
 Before quitting Poliziano, I will collect a few passages from 
 his poems which seem to be derived from the same source of 
 Latin inspiration. In his ' Giostra ' (lib. i. st. 78) he thus 
 describes the rose : 
 
 Ma vie piu lieta piu ridente e bella 
 Ardisce aprire il seno al sol la rosa : 
 Questa di verde gemma s' incappella : 
 Quella si mostra allo sportel vezzosa ; 
 L' altra che 'n dolce foco ardea pur ora 
 Languida cade e il bel pratello infiora. 
 
 This pretty little picture may be said to represent the three 
 ages of the rose. Though I cannot do justice to the original, 
 these verses may be accepted as a bad copy of a graceful 
 miniature : 
 
 Trembles the virgin violet in air, 
 
 With downcast eyes that seem love's sight to shun ; 
 
 But far more glad, more smiling, and more fair, 
 
 The rose expands her bosom to the sun ; 
 
 This bud in verdant wreaths her head doth bear ; 
 
 That opes her half-blown petals one by one : 
 
 And she who erewhile flames of love displayed, 
 
 Drooping declines, and strews with bloom the glade. 
 
 In the ' Orfeo ' he paraphrased the admonition of the last 
 lines of the Idyll thus : 
 
 Digli, zampogna mia, come via fugge 
 Cogli anni insieme la belleza snella
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 35? 
 
 E digli come il tempo ne distrugge, 
 Ne 1' et& persa mai si rinnovella : 
 Digli che sappi usar suo' forma bella, 
 Che sempre mai non saran rose e viole. 
 
 Or, as follows in English : 
 
 Nay, tell her, pipe of mine, how swift doth flee 
 
 Beauty together with our years amain ; 
 Tell her how time destroys all rarity, 
 
 Nor youth once lost can be renewed again ; 
 
 Tell her to use the gifts that yet remain ; 
 Hoses and violets blossom not alway. 
 
 To this refrain of Collige virgo rosas he is for ever 
 
 returning : 
 
 Deh, non insuperbir per tuo' belleza, 
 Dama ; ch' un breve tempo te la fura. 
 Canuta tornera la bionda treza 
 Che del bel viso adorna la figura. 
 Mentre che il fiore e nella sua vagheza, 
 Coglilo ; che belleza poco dura. 
 Fresca e la rosa da mattina, e a sera 
 Ell' ha perduto suo' belleza altera. 
 
 Nay, be not overproud of thy great grace, 
 Lady ! for brief time is thy thief and mine. 
 
 White will he turn those golden curls that lace 
 Thy forehead and thy cheeks so marble-fine. 
 
 Lo ! while the flower still flourisheth apace, 
 Pluck it ; for beauty but awhile doth shine. 
 
 Fair is the rose at dawn ; but long ere night 
 
 Her freshness fades, her pride hath vanished quite. 
 
 Thus Florentine poets used the rose as a reminder to girls 
 that they should enjoy their youth in season. The graver 
 simile of Catullus was not to their purpose. It first makes 
 its entrance into Italian poetry in these stanzas of Ariosto, 
 which are closely copied from the Latin : * 
 
 La verginella 6 simile alia rosa, 
 Ch' in bel giardin su la nativa spina 
 
 1 Orl. Fur. i. 42, 43. 
 
 A A 3
 
 358 THE PATHOS OF THE EOSE IN POETRY 
 
 Mentre sola e sieura si riposa, 
 
 Ne gregge ne pastor se le avvicina ; 
 
 L' aura soave e 1' alba rugiadosa, 
 
 L' acqua, la terra, al suo favor s' inchina : 
 
 Giovani vaghi e dame innamorate 
 
 Amano averne e seni e tempie ornate. 
 
 Ma non si tosto dal materno stelo 
 Eimossa viene, dal suo ceppo verde, 
 Che quanto avea dagli uomini e dal cielo 
 Favor, grazia, e belleza, tutto perde. 
 La vergine che '1 fior, di che piu zelo 
 Che de' begli occhi e della vita aver de, 
 Lascia altrui corre, il pregio ch' avea innante 
 Perde nel cor di tutti gli altri amanti. 
 
 The translation made by Eose of the ' Orlando Furioso ' 
 shall here be quoted : 
 
 The virgin has her image in the rose, 
 Sheltered in garden on its native stock, 
 Which there in solitude and safe repose 
 Blooms, unapproaehed by shepherd or by flock. 
 For this earth teems, and freshening water flows, 
 And breeze and dewy dawn their sweets unlock ; 
 With such the wistful youth his bosom dresses, 
 With such the enamoured damsel braids her tresses. 
 
 But wanton hands no sooner this displace 
 From the maternal stem, where it had grown, 
 Than all was withered ; whatsoever grace 
 It found with man or heaven ; bloom, beauty gone. 
 The damsel who should hold in higher place 
 Than light or life the flower which is her own, 
 Suffering the spoiler's hand to crop the prize, 
 Forfeits her worth in every other's eyes. 
 
 Thus far I have traced the separate working of the two 
 themes in Lorenzo de' Medici's, Poliziano's, and Ariosto's 
 poetry. Tasso, while expanding in the main the motive of 
 Ausonius, borrows one touch from Catullus in the following 
 famous passage of the ' Gerusalemme Liberata ' : l 
 
 1 Canto xvi. 15.
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 359 
 
 Deh ! mira, egli canto, spuntar la rosa 
 Dal verde suo modesta e verginella, 
 Che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa 
 Quanto si mostra men tanto e piu bella. 
 Ecco poi nudo il sen gia baldanzosa 
 Dispiega ; ecco poi langue e non par quella ; 
 Quella non par, che desiata avanti 
 Fu da mille donzelle e niille amanti. 
 
 Gosl trapassa al trapassar d' un giorno 
 Delia vita mortale il fiore e il verde : 
 Ne perch6 faccia indietro april ritorno, 
 Si rinfiora ella mai ne si rinverde. 
 Gogliam la rosa in sul mattino adorno 
 Di questo dl, che tosto il seren perde ; 
 Cogliam d' amor la rosa ; amiamo or quando 
 Esser si puote riamato amando. 
 
 A translation made by Thomas Bayley from these stanzas 
 shall be given, instead of any other, because it has been 
 chosen by Mrs. Boyle in her book : l 
 
 Mark ye (he sings) in modest maiden guise 
 The red rose peeping from her leafy nest ; 
 Half opening, now half closed, the jewel lies, 
 More bright her beauty seems the more represt. 
 
 But lo ! with bosom bared, the vaunting flower 
 Now droops, now dies, alas ! how changed the while, 
 From that sweet rose that wooed, in happier hour, 
 The young man's homage and the maiden's smile. 
 
 Thus, in the passing of a day, the flower, 
 The freshness of man's little life is o'er, 
 Though April skies return with sun and shower, 
 The flower may bloom not, life return no more. 
 
 Cull, then, the rose, for night is coming ; haste 
 While o'er its leaves the matin dew is poured ; 
 Cull, then, the rose of love while yet thou mayest 
 Living be loved adoring be adored. 
 
 Notwithstanding many pretty and ingenious turns, this 
 version is obviously imperfect through not following the 
 
 1 Ros Rosarum, p. 68.
 
 360 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 metre of the original. And Mrs. Boyle might have done well 
 to use the two stanzas in which Fairfax availed himself of 
 Spenser's splendid paraphrase. Those who are curious in 
 subtle points of translation should consult a letter which 
 appeared not long ago in the Academy upon the various 
 renderings of Tasso's song. The writer of that letter put 
 together with much skill one version, combining the best 
 portions of all. 
 
 Before leaving Italy for the North, let us see how Guarini 
 handled the rose bequeathed to him from Catullus and 
 Ausonius by Lorenzo de' Medici, Poliziano, Ariosto, and 
 Tasso. Amarilli, the heroine of the ' Pastor Fido,' has been 
 betrothed, for high reasons of state, to Silvio, a young hunter, 
 who has no mind for marriage ; and her father is naturally 
 anxious lest a long engagement in these circumstances should 
 prove the ruin of her happiness. He uses this beautiful, but 
 somewhat too artificial, expansion of the Catullian theme, 
 combined with Ariosto's simile of Zerbino's death, for the 
 expression of his uneasiness : 
 
 Come in vago giardin rosa gentile 
 
 Che nelle verdi sue tenere spoglie 
 
 Pure dianzi era rinchiusa, 
 
 E sotto 1' ombra del notturno velo 
 
 Incolta e sconosciuta 
 
 Stava, posando in sul materno stelo ; 
 
 Al subito apparir del primo raggio, 
 
 Che spunti in Oriente, 
 
 Si desta e si risente, 
 
 E scopre al sol, che la vagheggia e mira, 
 
 II suo vermiglio ed odorato seno, 
 
 Dov" ape susurrando 
 
 Nei mattutini albori 
 
 Vola, suggendo i rugiadosi umori ; 
 
 Ma s' allor non si coglie, 
 
 Sicch del mezzodl senta le fiamme, 
 
 Cade al cader del sole 
 
 SI scolorita in sulla siepe ombrosa, 
 
 Ch' appena si puo dir : questa fu rosa. 
 
 Cosi la verginella, 
 
 Mentre cura materna
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 361 
 
 La custodisce e chiude, 
 
 Chiude anch' ella il suo petto 
 
 All' amoroso affetto ; 
 
 Ma se lascivo sguardo 
 
 Di Cupido amator vien che la miri, 
 
 E n' oda ella i sospiri, 
 
 Gli apre subito il core, 
 
 E nel tenero sen riceve amore : 
 
 E se vergogna il cela, 
 
 temenza 1' affrena, 
 
 La misera, tacendo, 
 
 Per soverchio desio tutto si strugge. 
 
 Cosl manca belt& se "1 foco dura, 
 
 E perdendo stagion perde ventura. 
 
 In the following translation I have attempted to render the 
 effect of those partly-rhymed and carefully-rhythmed lyrics, 
 which Italian poets used in their dramatic work, and which 
 Milton adopted from them in his choruses of Samson 
 Agonistes : 
 
 As on fair garden lawns a gentle rose, 
 
 Who, lapped in tender sheaths of budding green, 
 
 Erewhile was shut from view, 
 
 And 'neath the shadow of night's sheltering hem, 
 
 Uncultured and unknown, 
 
 Abode in peace on the maternal stem, 
 
 With the first sudden beams that spring 
 
 O'er the dim East and day reveal, 
 
 Starts into life, begins to feel, 
 
 And opens to the sun's admiring gaze 
 
 Her crimson bosom laden with perfume, 
 
 Where the deep humming bee, 
 
 Bathed in cool light of morn, 
 
 Goes sucking honey-dews of darkness born ; 
 
 But, if none pluck her then, 
 
 If she but feel the fiery shafts of noon, 
 
 Falls with the falling of the sun, 
 
 So all discoloured on the dim hedgerows 
 
 That one can scarcely say : ' This was a rose ! ' 
 
 E'en thus the girl, 
 
 What time a mother's care 
 
 Wards her frail flower and guards, 
 
 Guards also her own breast
 
 362 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 From love and love's unrest ; 
 
 But if the wanton gaze 
 
 Of amorous lover chance on her to turn, 
 
 If she but hear his sighs that yearn, 
 
 She opens out her heart 
 
 And to her tender bosom takes love in ; 
 
 Then should shame hide her smart, 
 
 Or fear her will restrain, 
 
 The child in speechless pain 
 
 Through too much longing must decline and part. 
 
 Thus beauty fades, if the fire burneth long ; 
 
 And time's delay doth work her grievous wrong. 
 
 The extreme subtlety and rhetorical minuteness with which 
 this image 19 wrought somewhat impair its pictorial power. 
 But we must remember that this effect was calculated for an 
 audience sensitive to the cadences of rhythmical declamation 
 in the age which had invented modern music. For them 
 'the linked sweetness long drawn out' of Guarini's verbal 
 melody had a pecular charm. In order to show how poets 
 can employ similar natural suggestions to point opposite 
 lessons, let us set Guarini's ' all discoloured ' rose beside 
 Shakespeare's 
 
 Pale primroses, 
 
 That die unmarried ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady 
 Most incident to maids. 
 
 Finally, notice how Shakespeare puts the central thought 
 of Guarini, when he chooses, into a single phrase : 
 
 She never told her love, 
 But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, 
 Feed on her damask cheek. 
 
 Here the word damask brings the rose before us, as a little 
 earlier in Twelfth-Night the Duke gives the old analogy 
 between the rose and woman's beauty in a couplet : 
 
 For women are as roses, whose fair flower, 
 Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.
 
 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 363 
 
 It is now time to trace the influence of the Catullian and 
 Ausonian motives over English and French poetry. Spenser's 
 magnificent paraphrase from Tasso follows the original closely, 
 but omits, whether intentionally or not, to dwell upon the line 
 derived through Ariosto from Catullus. 1 
 
 The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay : 
 Ah ! see, whoso fair thing dost fain to see, 
 In springing flower the image of the day. 
 Ah ! see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly she 
 Dost first peep forth with bashful modesty, 
 That fairer seems the less ye see her may. 
 Lo, see soon after how more bold and free 
 Her bared bosom she doth broad display ; 
 
 Lo, see soon after how she fades and falls away. 
 
 So passeth, in the passing of a day, 
 
 Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower ; 
 Ne more doth flourish after first decay, 
 That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower 
 Of many a lady and many a paramour. 
 Gather therefore the rose whilst yet in prime, 
 For soon comes age that will her pride deflower : 
 Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time, 
 
 Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime. 
 
 It so happens that none of the pieces which I have hitherto 
 presented in this essay, with the exception of Tasso's stanzas 
 and Bayley's version of them, occur in Mrs. Boyle's book. 
 This does not prove the poverty of her anthology, but the 
 extraordinary richness of rose-literature. In tracing the 
 influence of Ausonius and Catullus upon modern poetry, I 
 shall, from this point forward, be able to refer to the pages of 
 ' Bos Eosarum.' Eonsard's sonnet, ' Comme on voit sur la 
 branche,' is interesting, as a somewhat faithful study from 
 Catullus ; but the maiden rose for whom he wrote it, had 
 been cropped by death, not by dishonour. 2 His more cele- 
 brated lyric, ' Mignonne, allez voir si la rose,' which has been 
 so elegantly translated by Mr. Andrew Lang, refines upon the 
 motive of Ausonius. 3 Here, in the French ' Cueillez, cueillez 
 
 1 Faery Queen, ii. xii. 74, 75. 
 - Bos Eosarum, p. 78. s Ibid. p. 79.
 
 364 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 
 
 votre jeunesse,' we recognise the Latin Collige virgo rosam. 
 In another sonnet Ronsard renders the leading theme of the 
 same idyll thus : * 
 
 Un soleil voit naitre et mourir la Hose. 
 
 When we turn to English poetry, we find in Samuel 
 Daniel's sonnet, ' Look, Delia,' a pretty close rendering of 
 Tasso's stanzas. 2 William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, applied 
 the metaphor of the rose to the waning of human life, 
 without any particular reference to youthful beauty. 3 But 
 the dominant note sounds again in Herrick's incomparable 
 ' Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,' and in Waller's graceful 
 ' Go, lovely Rose.' 4 For a final touch I will transcribe a 
 little fragment of Herrick's. It occurs in a poem which was 
 borrowed straight from the lines of Theocritus quoted above 
 
 (p. 351) : 5 
 
 This to your coyness I will tell ; 
 And having spoke it once, farewell. 
 The lily will not long endure, 
 Nor the snow continue pure ; 
 The rose, the violet, one day 
 Sees both these lady flowers decay, 
 And you must fade as well as they. 
 
 If I am right in reading ' sees ' in the last line but one ? 
 then even here, too, we have a reminiscence of the Ausonian 
 idyll. 
 
 From the analysis which I have partly made and partly 
 suggested in the foregoing pages, it will be seen how much 
 modern poetry owes to now almost neglected sources in 
 antique literature, and with what varied gracefulness of new 
 life the singers of the past four centuries invested themes 
 which they derived from scholarship. Other students, who 
 have traversed different fields of European poetry, will 
 probably be able to complete the pedigree which I have 
 endeavoured to establish in its main outlines from Ausonius 
 to Waller. 
 
 1 Eos Rosarum, p. 80. 2 Ibid. p. 119. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 138. 4 Ibid. pp. 147, 150. 
 
 5 Ibid. p. 148. It is from ' The Cruel Maid.'
 
 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN WITH 
 VICTOEIAN POETEY 
 
 ENGLISH literature, under the Tudors and the first king of 
 the house of Stuart, owed much of its unexampled richness 
 to a felicitous combination of circumstances. Feudalism had 
 received a mortal wound in the Wars of the Roses, and was 
 dying. The people came to knowledge of itself, and acquired 
 solidity during the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and 
 Elizabeth. Englishmen were brought into the fellowship of 
 European nations through Wolsey's audacious diplomacy. 
 They began to feel their force as an important factor, which 
 had henceforth to be reckoned with in peace or war. Grave 
 perils attended the formation of Great Britain into a separate 
 and self-sustaining integer of Europe ; nor was it until the 
 Protectorate that these islands made their full weight recog- 
 nised. None of the perils, however, which shook England 
 during the period of consolidation, sufficed to disturb the 
 equilibrium of government and social order. On the other 
 hand, they stimulated patriotism, and braced the nation with 
 a sense of its own dignity. Our final rupture with Rome, 
 after the trials of Queen Mary's reign were over, satisfied the 
 opinion of a large majority. Our collision with Spain, in the 
 crisis marked by the Armada, took a turn which filled the 
 population with reverent and religious enthusiasm. These 
 two decisive passages in English history promoted the pride 
 of the race, and inspired it with serious ardour. Instead of 
 weakening the Crown or the Church, they had the effect of 
 rendering both necessary to the nation. Then, when Scotland 
 was united to England and Ireland, at the accession of James,
 
 366 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 a disciplined and nobly expansive people thought themselves 
 for a moment on the pinnacle of felicity. 
 
 While the English were thus becoming a powerful and 
 self-conscious nation, those intellectual changes which divided 
 the mediaeval from the modern period, and which we know 
 by the names of Renaissance and Reformation, took place. 
 It is a peculiarity of this transition time in our islands, that 
 what used to be called 'the new learning,' with its new 
 theories of education, its new way of regarding nature, and 
 its new conceptions of human life, was introduced simultane- 
 ously with the Reformation. Italy had accomplished the 
 Revival of Learning ; Germany had revolted against Catholic- 
 ism. France had felt both movements unequally and partially, 
 amid the confusion of civil wars and the clash of contending 
 sects. Italy, after the Tridentine Council, was relapsing into 
 reactionary dulness. Germany was dismembered by strifes 
 and schisms. France underwent the throes of a passionate 
 struggle, which subordinated the intellectual aspects of both 
 Renaissance and Reformation to political interest. England 
 alone, meanwhile, enjoyed the privilege of receiving that two- 
 fold influx of the modern spirit without an overwhelming 
 strain upon her vital forces. The Marian persecution was 
 severe enough to test the bias of the people, and to remind 
 them of the serious points at issue, without rending society 
 to its foundations. Humanism reached our shores when its 
 first enthusiasms enthusiasms which seemed in Italy to have 
 brought again the gods and vices of the pagan past had 
 tempered their delirium. We have only to compare men like 
 More, Ascham, Colet, Buchanan, Camden, Cheke, the pioneers 
 of our Renaissance, with Filelfo, Poggio, Poliziano, Pontano, 
 in order to perceive how far more sober and healthy was the 
 tone of the new learning in Great Britain than in Italy. 
 
 In this connection it is worthy of notice that humanism, 
 before it moulded the minds of the English, had already 
 permeated Italian and French literature. Classical erudition 
 had been adapted to the needs of modern thought. Antique 
 authors had been collected, printed, annotated, and translated. 
 They were fairly mastered in the south, and assimilated to
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 367 
 
 the style of the vernacular. By these means much of the 
 learning popularised by our poets, essayists, and dramatists 
 came to us at second-hand, and bore the stamp of con- 
 temporary genius. In like manner, the best works of Italian, 
 French, Spanish, and German literature were introduced into 
 Great Britain together with the classics. The age favoured 
 translation, and English readers, before the close of the 
 sixteenth century, were in possession of a cosmopolitan 
 library in their mother tongue, including choice specimens of 
 ancient and modern masterpieces. 
 
 These circumstances sufficiently account for the richness 
 and variety of Elizabethan literature. They also help to 
 explain two points which must strike every student of that 
 literature its native freshness, and its marked unity of style. 
 
 Elizabethan literature was fresh and native, because it was 
 the utterance of a youthful race, aroused to vigorous self- 
 consciousness under conditions which did not depress or 
 exhaust its energies. The English opened frank eyes upon 
 the discovery of the world and man, which had been effected 
 by the Eenaissance. They were not wearied with collecting, 
 collating, correcting, transmitting to the press. All the hard 
 work of assimilating the humanities had been done for them. 
 They had only to survey and to enjoy, to feel and to express, 
 to lay themselves open to delighful influences, to con the 
 noble lessons of the past, to thrill beneath the beauty and 
 the awe of an authentic revelation. Criticism had not laid 
 its cold, dry finger on the blossoms of the fancy. The new 
 learning was still young enough to be a thing of wonder and 
 entrancing joy. To absorb it sufficed. Like the blood made 
 in the veins of a growing man by strong meat and sound 
 wine, it coursed to the brain and created a fine frenzy. That 
 was a period of bright ideas, stimulating creative faculty, 
 animating the people with hope and expectation, undimmed, 
 untarnished by the corrosion of the analytic reason. ' Nobly 
 wild, not mad,' the adolescent giants of that age, Marlowe 
 and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare, broke into spontaneous 
 numbers, charged with the wisdom and the passion of the 
 ages fused in a divine clairvoyance.
 
 368 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 Elizabethan literature has a marked unity of style. We 
 notice a strong generic similarity in those poets which veils 
 their specific differences. That is perhaps the first and most 
 salient point of contrast between Elizabethan and Victorian 
 literature. It makes a cautious critic pause. After the lapse 
 of two centuries, he asks himself, will Byron, Keats, Shelley, 
 Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, Tennyson, Campbell, William 
 Morris, Rogers, Swinburne, Clough, Bossetti, Browning, Mrs. 
 Browning, Matthew Arnold, and the rest of them, seem 
 singing to one dominant tune, in spite of their so obvious 
 differences ? Will our posterity discern in them the note in 
 common which we find in Sidney, Herrick, Spenser, Shake- 
 speare, Fletcher, Marlowe, Jonson, Barnfield, Dekker, Marston, 
 Chapman, Raleigh, Drayton, Drummond, Webster, and the 
 rest of those great predecessors ? The question has to be 
 asked ; but the answer is not easily given. We can neither 
 reject ourselves into the past nor project ourselves into the 
 future, with certainty sufficient to decide whether what looks 
 like similarity in the Elizabethan poets, and what looks like 
 diversity in the Victorian poets, are illusions of the present. 
 
 Yet something can be attempted in explanation of the 
 apparent puzzle. The circumstances of the Elizabethan age 
 favoured unity of style. The language, to begin with, had 
 recently been remade under the influence of new ideals and 
 new educational systems. Far more than lapse of years 
 and wastes of desolating warfare separated sixteenth-century 
 English from the speech of Chaucer. The spirit itself, which 
 shapes language to the use of mind, had changed through 
 the action of quickening conceptions and powerfully excited 
 energies. And to this change in the spirit the race was 
 eagerly responsive. In a certain way all writers felt the 
 Bible, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, Germany; all strove to 
 be in tune with the new learning. At the same time, 
 criticism was hardly in its cradle ; you find a trace of it in 
 Jonson, Bacon, Selden, Camden ; but it does not touch the 
 general. The people were anything but analytical, and poetry 
 issued from the very people's hearts, as melody from the 
 strings of the violoncello. The spontaneity which we have
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 369 
 
 already noted as a main mark of Elizabethan utterance, led 
 thus to unity of style. The way in which classical master- 
 pieces were then studied, conduced to the same result. Those 
 perennial sources of style were enjoyed in their entirety, 
 absorbed, assimilated, reproduced with freedom. They were 
 not closely scrutinised, examined with the microscope, studied 
 with the view of emphasising this or that peculiarity a 
 single critic found in them. And the same holds good 
 about contemporary foreign literatures. Everything which 
 these literatures contained was grist for the English mill ; not 
 models to be copied, but stuff to be used. 
 
 Now compare the intellectual conditions of the Victorian 
 age. Take language first. Instead of having no literary 
 past, except Chaucer, Skelton, the English Bible, and Sir 
 Thomas Malory behind our backs, we have the long 
 self-conscious period between Dryden and Byron, during 
 which our mother tongue was carefully elaborated upon 
 a definite system. Victorian poetry has to reckon with 
 Elizabethan poetry and the poetry of Queen Anne for 
 English people call their epochs by the names of queens. 
 This constitutes at the outset a great difference, making for 
 diversity in style. A writer has more models to choose from, 
 more openings for the exercise of his personal predilections. 
 And the mental attitude has altered also. We are highly 
 conscious of our aims, profoundly analytical. All study of 
 literature has become critical and comparative. The scientific 
 spirit makes itself powerfully felt in the domain of art. 
 It is impossible for people of the present to be as fresh and 
 native as the Elizabethans were. Such a mighty stream, 
 novies Styx interfusa, in the shape of accumulated erudition, 
 grave national experiences, spirit-quelling doubts, insurgent 
 philosophies, and all too aching pressing facts and fears, 
 divides the men of this time from the men of that. It is 
 enough now to have indicated these points. The argument 
 will return to some of them in detail. For the moment 
 we may safely assert that a prominent note of Elizabethan 
 as distinguished from Victorian literature is unity of tone, 
 
 B B
 
 370 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 due to the felicitous circumstances of the nation in that 
 earlier period. 
 
 II 
 
 What, then, is the characteristic of Elizabethan poetry? 
 I think the answer to this question lies in the words 
 freedom, adolescence, spontaneity ; mainly freedom. The 
 writers of that age were free from the bondage to great 
 names, Virgil or Cicero or Seneca. They owned no allegiance 
 to great languages, like the Latin ; to famous canons of taste, 
 like the Aristotelian unities ; to scholastic authority and 
 academical prescription. They were politically and socially 
 free, adoring the majesty of England in the person of their 
 sovereign, and flattering a national ideal when they burned 
 poetic incense to Elizabeth. That strain of servility which 
 jars upon our finer sense in the romantic epics of Ariosto 
 and Tasso is wholly absent from ' The Faery Queen.' They 
 were notably free in all that appertains to religion. Where 
 but in England could a playwright have used words at once 
 so just and so bold as these of Dekker? 
 
 The best of men 
 
 That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer 
 A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit : 
 The first true gentleman that ever breathed. 
 
 A delicate taste can hardly be offended by this reference to 
 Christ, and yet we feel that it could not have been made 
 except in an age of undisputed liberty. Their freedom was 
 the freedom of young strength, untrammelled energies, with 
 El Dorado in the western main, and boundless regions for 
 the mind to traverse. This makes their touch on truth and 
 goodness and beauty so right, so natural, so unerring. They 
 have the justice of perception, the clarity of vision, the 
 cleanliness of feeling which belong to generous and healthy 
 manhood in its earliest prime. The consequence of this 
 freedom was that each man in that age wrote what he 
 thought best, wrote out of himself, and sang spontaneously. 
 He had no fear of academies, of censorship, of critical coteries,
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 371 
 
 of ecclesiastical censure, before his eyes. How different in 
 this respect was the liberty of Shakespeare from the servitude 
 of Tasso. At the same time, as we have already seen, this 
 spontaneity was controlled by a strong sense of national 
 unity. The English were possessed with an ideal, which 
 tuned their impassioned utterances to one keynote. The 
 spirit of the people was patriotic, highly moralised, intensely 
 human, animated by a robust belief in reality ; martial, yet 
 jealous of domestic peace ; assiduous in toil, yet quick to 
 overleap material obstacles and revel in the dreams of the 
 imagination; manly, but delicate; inured to hardship, but 
 not quelled as yet by disappointment and the disillusion of 
 experience. In a word, Elizabethan poetry is the utterance 
 of ' a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong 
 man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks .... like 
 an eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled 
 eyes at the full midday beam.' 
 
 Freedom being thus the dominant note of Elizabethan 
 poetry, it follows that the genius of the race will return to it 
 with love and admiration at epochs marked by the resurgent 
 spirit of liberty. This is why the literature of the Victorian 
 age has been so powerfully influenced by that of Elizabeth. 
 The French Revolution shook Europe to the centre, and 
 opened illimitable vistas at the commencement of the century. 
 In 1815, England, after her long struggle with Napoleon, 
 stood crowned with naval and military laurels, in possession 
 of a hardly-earned peace. It is not to be wondered that critics 
 like Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, editors like Gifford, historians 
 like Collier, should have ransacked the forgotten treasures of 
 the Shakespearian drama at this moment. Poetry aimed at 
 Elizabethan phraseology and used Elizabethan metres. Byron 
 adapted the Spenserian and octave stanzas to his purposes 
 of satire and description: Keats and Shelley treated the 
 heroic couplet with Elizabethan laxity of structure and 
 variety of cadence ; Wordsworth and Coleridge revived the 
 Elizabethan rhythms of blank verse. The sonnet was culti- 
 vated, and lyrical measures assumed bewildering forms of 
 richness. At the same time, a revolt began against those
 
 372 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 canons of taste which had prevailed in the last century. 
 Wordsworth denounced conventional poetic diction ; it 
 savoured of literary treason to profess a particular partiality 
 for Pope ; fancy was preferred to sense, exuberance of 
 imagery to chastened style, audacity of invention to logic 
 and correctness. 
 
 This return to Elizabethanism has marked the whole course 
 of Victorian poetry. But times are changed, and we ourselves 
 are changed in them. The men of this century have never 
 recaptured ' the first fine careless rapture ' of the sixteenth 
 century. What were dreams then, have become sober expect- 
 ations. Instead of El Dorado we have conquered California, 
 the gold-fields of Australia, the diamond mines of South 
 Africa. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries 
 North America was won and lost ; East India was gained by 
 heroism and adventure worthy of a Drake and Ealeigh ; and 
 now the crown of that vast empire on the forehead of our 
 Queen weighs heavy with the sense of serious responsibilities. 
 The English race is no longer adolescent ; we cannot model 
 our national genius like a beautiful young hero rejoicing in 
 his naked strength and scattering armies by his shout : the 
 sculptor who did so would forget the years which have 
 ploughed wrinkles on that hero's forehead, the steam-engines 
 which are his chariot, the ironclad navies which waft him over 
 ocean, the electricity which plays like lightning in his eyes. 
 Victorian poets cannot be spontaneous in the same sense as 
 our ancestors were. Like lago, they are nothing if not 
 critical. Science has imposed on them her burden of analysis, 
 and though science reveals horizons far beyond the dreams of 
 Bacon, it fills the soul with something well-nigh kin to hope- 
 lessness. Man shrinks before the Universe. We have lived 
 through so much ; we have seen so many futile philosophies 
 rise like mushrooms and perish ; we have tried so many 
 political experiments, and listened to so many demagogues of 
 various complexions, that a world-fatigue has penetrated deep 
 into our spirit. The masterpiece of the century is Goethe's 
 Faust, and its hero suffers from the Welt-schmerz. A simple 
 faith in God and the Bible yields to critical inquiry, compara-
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 378 
 
 tive theology, doubts and difficulties of all kinds. Religious 
 liberty in this age consists more in the right to disbelieve as 
 we think best than to believe according to our conscience. 
 Pessimism, already strong in Byron, has grown and gathered 
 strength with introspection until we find it lurking in nearly 
 all the sincerest utterances of the present. We are oppressed 
 with social problems which admit of no solution, due to the 
 vast increase of our population, to the industrial changes 
 which have turned England from an agricultural into a 
 manufacturing country, to the unequal distribution of wealth, 
 the development of huge, hideous towns, the seething multi- 
 tudes of vicious and miserable paupers which they harbour. 
 We watch the gathering of revolutionary storm-clouds, hear 
 the grumbling of thunder in the distance, and can only sit 
 meanwhile in darkness so gigantic and unmanageable are 
 the forces now in labour for some mighty birth of time. Who 
 can be optimistic under these conditions ? ' Merry England ' 
 sounds like a mockery now. Instead of merry England the 
 Victorian poet has awful, earnest, grimly menacing London 
 to sing in. His temptation, especially in the third period of 
 our century, is to retire from the world into an artificial 
 paradise of art, and there, among exotic fragrances and foreign 
 airs, to seek a refuge from the sombre problems forced upon 
 him by the actualities of life. These things were not felt so 
 much at the beginning of the century ; they are bringing it to 
 a close in sadness and strong searchings of soul. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Elizabethan genius found its main expression in the drama. 
 No epic worthy of the name was produced in the sixteenth 
 century, for Spenser's ' Faery Queen ' has not the right to be 
 so styled. But every great national epoch which attains to 
 utterance through art has a specific clairvoyance, and England 
 in the age we call Elizabethan was clairvoyant for the drama ; 
 that is to say, men wrought with an unerring instinct in this 
 field, and the lesser talents were lifted into the sphere of the 
 greater when they entered it. After the drama, and closely
 
 374 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 associated with it, came those songs for music in which the 
 English of the sixteenth century excelled. The lyric rapture, 
 that which has been called the lyric cry, penetrates all verbal 
 music of that period. We find it modulating blank verse and 
 controlling the rhythms of the couplet and the stanza. 
 The best subsidiary work of the age consisted of transla- 
 tions, adaptations, and free handlings of antique themes in 
 narrative verse. Chapman's ' Homer,' Fairfax's ' Tasso,' 
 Marlowe's ' Hero and Leander,' Shakespeare's ' Venus and 
 Adonis ' and the ' Eape of Lucrece,' rank among the master- 
 pieces of Elizabethan poetry. But drama and song, when 
 all accounts are settled, remain the crowning glories of that 
 literature. 
 
 The Victorian age can boast no national drama. Poetical 
 plays have indeed been produced which do credit to the talents 
 of their authors. 1 Yet the century has not expressed its real 
 stuff, nor shown its actual clairvoyance in that line. We 
 cannot point to a Victorian drama as we do to an Elizabethan 
 drama, and challenge the world to match it. This is due 
 perhaps in part to those incalculable changes which have 
 substituted the novel for the drama. The public of the present 
 time is a public of readers rather than of hearers, and the 
 muster-roll of brilliant novelists, from Scott and Jane Austen, 
 through Thackeray and Dickens, down to George Eliot and 
 George Meredith, can be written off against the playwrights 
 of the sixteenth century. Poetry, surveyed from a sufficient 
 altitude, claims these imaginative makers, though they used 
 the vehicle of prose. Even less than the sixteenth has 
 the nineteenth produced an epic, and for similar reasons. 
 Tennyson chose the right name for his Arthurian string of 
 studies when he called them ' Idylls of the King.' To claim 
 for them epical coherence was only a brilliant afterthought. 
 It is not given to any race under the conditions of conscious 
 culture to create a genuine epic. That rare flower of art puts 
 forth its bloom in the first dawn of national existence. If we 
 
 1 Darley, Lander, Beddoes, Home, Procter, Shelley, Browning, 
 Taylor, Swinburne, and possibly Tennyson, demand commemoration in 
 a footnote.
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 375 
 
 except the ' Iliad ' and the ' Odyssey," how few real epics 
 does the human race possess ! The German ' Nibelungen 
 Lied ' is a late rifacimento of Scandinavian sagas. Sir 
 Thomas Malory's ' Morte d'Arthur,' our nearest approach to 
 a true epic, is the digest of a score of previous romances. The 
 ' Song of Roland ' is an epical lyric. We call the ' ./Eneid ' 
 an epic because it throbs with the sense of Rome. Tanta 
 molis erat Bomanam condere gentem. We call the 'Divine 
 Comedy ' an epic because it embalms the spirit of the Middle 
 Ages at their close ; we call ' Paradise Lost ' and ' Paradise 
 Regained ' epics because they carry such a weight of meaning 
 and are so monumentally constructed. But the '.ZEneid,' 
 the ' Divine Comedy,' and Milton's ' Paradise ' are not epics 
 in the proper sense of the word : they are the products of 
 reflection and individual genius, not the self-expression of a 
 nation in its youth. And just as the novel has absorbed our 
 forces for the drama, so has it satisfied our thirst for epical 
 narration. In that hybrid form where poetry assumes the 
 garb of prose, both drama and epic for the modern world lie 
 embedded. 
 
 What, then, are the specific channels of Victorian utterance 
 in verse ? To define them is difficult, because they are so subtly 
 varied and so inextricably interwoven. Yet I think they may 
 be superficially described as the idyll and the lyric. Under 
 the idyll I should class all narrative and descriptive poetry, 
 of which this age has been extraordinarily prolific ; sometimes 
 assuming the form of minstrelsy, as in the lays of Scott ; 
 sometimes approaching to the classic style, as in the Hellenics 
 of Landor ; sometimes rivalling the novelette, as in the work 
 of Tennyson ; sometimes aiming at psychological analysis, as 
 in the portraits drawn by Robert Browning ; sometimes con- 
 fining art to bare history, as in Crabbe ; sometimes indulging 
 flights of pure artistic fancy, as in Keats' ' Endymion ' and 
 ' Lamia.' Under its many metamorphoses the narrative and 
 descriptive poetry of our century bears the stamp of the idyll, 
 because it is fragmentary and because it results in a picture. 
 Here it inclines to the drama, here it borrows tone from the 
 epic ; in one place it is lyrical, in another it is didactic ; fancy
 
 376 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 has presided over the birth of this piece, reflection has attended 
 the production of that. But in each case the artist has seen 
 his subject within narrow compass, treated that as a complete 
 whole, and given to the world a poem in the narrative and 
 descriptive style, reminding us of the epic in its general form, 
 of the drama or the lyric in its particular treatment. Those 
 who have read the technical lessons which the idylls of 
 Theocritus convey, will understand why I classify this 
 exuberant jungle of Victorian poetry under the common 
 title of idyll. 
 
 No literature and no age has been more fertile of lyric 
 poetry than English literature in the age of Victoria. The 
 fact is apparent. I should superfluously burden my readers 
 if I were to prove the point by reference to Byron, Coleridge, 
 Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Eossetti, Clough, Swinburne, 
 Arnold, Tennyson, and I do not know how many of less 
 illustrious but splendid names, in detail. The causes are not 
 far to seek. Without a comprehensive vehicle like the epic, 
 which belongs to the first period of national life, or the drama, 
 which belongs to its secondary period, our poets of a later day 
 have had to sing from their inner selves, subjectively, intro- 
 spectively, obeying impulses from nature and the world, which 
 touched them not as they were Englishmen, but as they were 
 this man or that woman. They had no main current of 
 literature wherein to plunge themselves, and cry : ' Ma 
 naufragar m' e dolce in questo mar.' 1 They could not 
 forego what made them individuals ; tyrannous circumstances 
 of thought and experience rendered their sense of personality 
 too acute. When they sang, they sang with their particular 
 voice ; and the lyric is the natural channel for such song. 
 But what a complex thing is this Victorian lyric ! It includes 
 Wordsworth's sonnets and Kossetti's ballads, Coleridge's 
 ' Ancient Mariner ' and Keats' odes, Clough's ' Easter Day ' 
 and Tennyson's ' Maud,' Swinburne's ' Songs before Sunrise ' 
 and Browning's ' Dramatis Persona?,' Thomson's ' City of 
 Dreadful Night ' and Mary Robinson's ' Handful of Honey- 
 
 1 ' To drown in this great tide is sweet for me.'
 
 WITH VICTOKIAN POETRY 377 
 
 suckles,' Andrew Lang's Ballades and Sharp's 'Weird of 
 Michael Scot,' Dobson's dealings with the eighteenth century 
 and Noel's 'Little Child's Monument,' Barnes's Dorsetshire 
 Poems and Buchanan's London Lyrics, the songs from 
 ' Empedocles on Etna ' and Ebenezer Jones's ' Pagan Drinking 
 Chant,' Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and Mrs. Browning's 
 ' Pan is Dead,' Newman's hymns and Gosse's Chant Royal. 
 The kaleidoscope presented by this lyric is so inexhaustible 
 that any man with the fragment of a memory might pair off 
 scores of poems by admired authors, and yet not fall upon the 
 same parallels as those which I have made. 
 
 The genius of our century, debarred from epic, debarred 
 from drama, falls back upon idyllic and lyrical expression. 
 In the idyll it satisfies its objective craving after art. In the 
 lyric it pours forth personality. It would be wrong, however, 
 to limit the wealth of our poetry to these two branches. 
 Such poems as Wordsworth's ' Excursion,' Byron's ' Don 
 Juan ' and ' Childe Harold,' Mrs. Browning's ' Aurora Leigh,' 
 William Morris's ' Earthly Paradise,' dough's ' Amours de 
 Voyage,' are not to be classified in either species. They are 
 partly autobiographical, and in part the influence of the tale 
 makes itself distinctly felt in them. Nor again can we omit 
 the translations, of which so many have been made ; some of 
 them real masterpieces and additions to our literature. Gary's 
 Dante, Eossetti's versions from the early Tuscan lyrists, 
 FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam, are eminent examples. But the 
 list might be largely extended. Then again Morris's ' Song 
 of Sigurd,' Swinburne's ' Tristram of Lyonesse,' E. Arnold's 
 ' Light of Asia,' deserve a place apart, as epical rehandlings 
 of memorable themes. 
 
 IV 
 
 In all this Victorian poetry we find the limitations of our 
 epoch, together with its eminent qualities. Criticism and 
 contemplation have penetrated literature with a deeper 
 and more pervasive thoughtfulness. Our poets have lost 
 spontaneity and joyful utterance. But they have acquired a 
 keener sense of the problems which perplex humanity. The
 
 378 
 
 author of ' In Memoriam ' struck a false note when he 
 exclaimed : 
 
 I sing but as the linnet sings. 
 
 Nothing can be more unlike a linnet's song than the meta- 
 physical numbers of that justly valued threnody. Clough 
 came closer to the truth when he hinted at the poet's problem 
 in this age as thus : 
 
 To finger idly some old Gordian knot, 
 Unskilled to sunder and too weak to cleave, 
 And with much toil attain to half-believe. 
 
 The most characteristic work of the century has a double 
 object, artistic and philosophical. Poetry is used to express 
 some theory of life. In Byron the world-philosophy is cynical 
 or pessimistic. Shelley interweaves his pantheism with 
 visions of human perfectibility. Wordsworth proclaims an 
 esoteric cult of nature. Swinburne at one time rails against 
 the tyrant gods, at another preaches the gospel of republican 
 revolt. Matthew Arnold embodies a system of ethical and 
 aesthetical criticism in his verse. Clough expresses the 
 changes which the Christian faith has undergone, and the 
 perplexities of conduct. Thomson indulges the blackest 
 pessimism, a pessimism more dolorous than Leopardi's. 
 Browning is animated by a robust optimism, turning fearless 
 somersaults upon the brink of the abyss. Mrs. Browning 
 condenses speculations upon social and political problems. 
 Eoden Noel, too little appreciated to be rightly understood, 
 attempts a world-embracing metaphysic of mysticism. Even 
 those poets who do not yield so marked a residuum of 
 philosophy are touched to sadness and gravity by the intel- 
 lectual atmosphere in which they work. Virgil's great line : 
 Sunt lacrimse rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt 
 
 might be chosen as a motto for the corpus poetarum of our 
 epoch. In reading what the age has produced, certain phrases 
 linger in our memory 
 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 
 
 The still, sad music of humanity.
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 379 
 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair. 
 
 Seek, seeker, in thyself, submit to find 
 
 In the stones bread and life in the blank mind. 
 
 These haunt us like leading-phrases, the master notes of 
 the whole music. 
 
 Starting with enthusiasm at the commencement of the 
 century, our poets have gradually lost such glow of hope as 
 inspired them with spontaneous numbers in its earlier decades. 
 The wide survey of elder and contemporary literatures sub- 
 mitted to their gaze has rendered them more assimilative, 
 reproductive, imitative, reminiscent than spontaneous. When 
 Matthew Arnold defined poetry in general to be ' a criticism 
 of life,' he uttered a curious and pregnant paradox. It would 
 be hardly a paradox to assert that Victorian poetry is in large 
 measure the criticism of all existing literatures. More and 
 more we have dedicated our powers to the study of technic- 
 alities, to the cultivation of the graces, the elaboration of 
 ornament, and to the acclimatisation upon English soil of 
 flowers borrowed from alien gardens of the Muses. We have 
 forgotten what George Sand said to Flaubert about style : 
 ' Tu la consideres comme un but, elle n'est qu'un effet.' 
 The result is a polychromatic abundance of what may be 
 called cultured poetry, which does not reach the heart of the 
 people, and does not express its spirit. That is due, no doubt, 
 in part to the fact that there is less of aspiration than of 
 meditation to deal with now, less of an actual joy in eventful 
 living than of serious reflection upon the meanings and the 
 purposes of life. Yet this poetry is true to the spirit of 
 a critical and cultured age ; and when the time comes to 
 gather up the jewels of Victorian literature, it will be dis- 
 covered how faithfully the poets have uttered the thoughts of 
 the educated minority. 
 
 A comprehensive survey of olir poetry is rendered difficult 
 by the fact that no type, like the drama of the sixteenth 
 century, has controlled its movement. We cannot regard it
 
 380 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 as a totality composed of many parts, progressing through 
 several stages of development. In this respect, again, it 
 obeys the intellectual conditions of the century. Its inner 
 unity will eventually be found, not in the powerful projection 
 of a nation's soul, but in the careful analysis and subtle 
 delineation of thoughts and feelings which agitated society 
 during one of the most highly self-conscious and specu- 
 lative periods which the world has passed through. The 
 genius of the age is scientific, not artistic. In such an age 
 poetry must perforce be auxiliary to science, showing how 
 individual minds have been touched to fine issues of rhythmic 
 utterance by the revolutions in thought which history, philo- 
 sophy, and criticism are effecting. 
 
 Passing from these general reflections to points of com- 
 parison in detail, we must remember that Victorian poetry 
 started with a return to Elizabethan, and that this motive 
 impulse has never wholly been lost sight of. The two periods 
 may be fitly compared in that which both possess in common, 
 a copious and splendid lyric. Our means of studying Eliza- 
 bethan lyric poetry have been largely increased in the past 
 years by the labours of Mr. Thomas Oliphant, Professor 
 Arber, Mr. W. J. Linton, and Mr. A. H. Bullen. To the last- 
 named of these gentlemen we owe three volumes of lyrics 
 culled from Elizabethan song-books, which are a perfect mine 
 of hitherto neglected treasures. 1 Taken in connection with 
 the songs from the dramatists and the collected lyrics 
 .of men like Sidney, Ealeigh, Spenser, Herrick, these books 
 furnish us with a tolerably complete body of poems in this 
 species. 
 
 What strikes us in the whole of this great mass of lyric 
 poetry, is its perfect adaptation to music, its limpidity and 
 
 1 They are published by Mr. J. C. Nimmo, the last of them, called 
 ' Love Poems from the Song-Books of the Seventeenth Century,' being 
 privately printed.
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 381 
 
 directness of utterance. Like Shelley's skylark, the poet has 
 been 
 
 Pouring his full heart 
 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 
 
 Each composition is meant to be sung, and can be sung, 
 because the poet's soul was singing when he made it. They 
 are not all of one kind or of equal simplicity. The lyrics 
 from the song-books, for example, have not the intensity of 
 some songs introduced into the dramas of that period, 'in 
 which,' as Mr. Pater once observed while speaking of the 
 verses sung by Mariana's page in Measure for Measure, ' the 
 kindling power and poetry of the whole play seems to pass 
 for a moment into an actual strain of music.' They are rarely 
 so high-strung and weighty with meaning as Webster's dirges 
 or as Ford's and Shirley's solemn descants on the transitori- 
 ness of earthly love and glory. Nor, again, do we often 
 welcome in them that fulness of romantic colour which makes 
 the lyrics of Beaumont and Fletcher so resplendent. This is 
 perhaps because their melodies are not the outgrowth of 
 dramatic situations, but have their life and being in the aerial 
 element of musical sound. For the purposes of singing they 
 are exactly adequate, being substantial enough to sustain and 
 animate the notes and yet so slight as not to overburden 
 these with too much meditation and emotion. We feel that 
 they have arisen from the natural marrying of musical words 
 to musical phrases in the minds which made them. They 
 are the right verbal counterpart to vocal and instrumental 
 melody, never perplexing and surcharging the tones which 
 need language for a vehicle with complexities of fancy, invo- 
 lutions of ideas, or the disturbing tyranny of vehement 
 passions. And this right quality of song, the presence of 
 which indicates widespread familiarity with musical require- 
 ments in England of the sixteenth century, may be likewise 
 found in the more deliberate lyrics of dramatic or literary 
 poets in Jonson's and Shakespeare's stanzas, in the lofty 
 odes of Spenser and the jewelled workmanship of Herrick. 
 We discover but little of this quality in the lyrics of the
 
 382 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 Victorian age. It is noticeable that those poets upon whom 
 we are apt to set the least store now, as Byron, Scott, 
 Hood, Campbell, Moore, Barry Cornwall, Mrs. Hemans, 
 possessed it in greater perfection than their more illustrious 
 contemporaries. 
 
 I once asked an eminent musician, the late Madame 
 Goldschmidt, why Shelley's lyrics were ill-adapted to music. 
 She made me read aloud to her the ' Song of Pan ' and those 
 lovely lines ' To the Night,' ' Swiftly walk o'er the western 
 wave, Spirit of Night ! ' Then she pointed out how the verbal 
 melody seemed intended to be self-sufficing in these lyrics, 
 how full of complicated thoughts and changeful images the 
 verse is, how packed with consonants the words are, how the 
 tone of emotion alters, and how no one melodic phrase could 
 be found to fit the daedal woof of the poetic emotion. 
 
 ' Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, 
 
 Star-inwrought ! 
 
 Blind with thine hair the eyes of day, 
 Kiss her until she be wearied out 
 
 ' How different that is,' said Madame Goldschmidt, ' from 
 the largo of your Milton : 
 
 ' Let the bright Seraphim in burning row, 
 Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow ! ' 
 
 ' How different it is from Heine's simplicity : 
 
 ' Auf Fliigeln des Gesanges 
 Herzliebchen trag' ich dich fort. 
 
 ' I can sing them,' and she did sing them then and there, 
 much to my delight ; ' and I can sing Dryden, but I could 
 not sing your Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats ; no, and not much 
 of your Tennyson either. Tennyson has sought out all the 
 solid, sharp words, and put them together; music cannot 
 come between.' This was long ago, and it gave me many 
 things to think over, until I could comprehend to what 
 
 1 Madame Goldschmidt sang these lines from the book of Handel's 
 Sampson. In Milton they begin with where, not let.
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 383 
 
 extent the best lyrics of the Victorian age are not made to 
 be sung. 
 
 Madame Goldschmidt's remarks were only partially true 
 perhaps. There is no reason, if we possessed a Schubert, 
 why Coleridge's ' Kubla Khan ' should not be set to music ; 
 and Handel could surely have written alternate choruses and 
 solos for a considerable part of Wordsworth's ' Ode to Duty.' 
 Yet the fact remains that Victorian lyrics are not so singable 
 as Elizabethan lyrics ; and the reason is that they are far 
 more complex, not in their verbal structure merely, but 
 in the thoughts, images, emotions which have prompted 
 them. The words carry too many, too various, too con- 
 templative suggestions. Nothing can be lyrically more 
 lovely than : 
 
 Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 Or than : 
 
 Fair are others : none beholds thee : 
 
 But thy voice sounds low and tender 
 Like the fairest, for it folds thee 
 
 From the sight, that liquid splendour ; 
 And all feel, yet see thee never, 
 As I feel now, lost for ever ! 
 
 Or than : 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings ? 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago ; 
 Or is it some more humble lay, 
 Familiar matters of to-day ? 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
 That has been, and may be again. 
 
 But Wordsworth in the last of these examples is meditative, 
 reflective, questioning ; his stanza will not suit the directness 
 of musical melody. But the finest phrases in the specimens 
 from Keats and Shelley, ' charmed magic casements,' ' perilous 
 seas,' ' that liquid splendour,' perplex and impede the 
 movement of song.
 
 384 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 It is not precisely in poignancy or depth or gravity of 
 thought that the Victorian differ from the Elizabethan lyrists. 
 What can be more poignant than : 
 
 Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, 
 Thou dost not bite so nigh 
 
 As benefits forgot : 
 Though thou the waters warp, 
 Thy sting is not so sharp 
 
 As friend remembered not. 
 
 What can be deeper than : 
 
 Of what is't fools make such vain keeping ? 
 Sin their conception, their birth weeping ; 
 Their life a general mist of error, 
 Their death a hideous storm of terror. 
 
 What can be graver than : 
 
 The glories of our birth and state 
 Are shadows, not substantial things ; 
 
 There is no armour against fate, 
 Death lays his icy hand on kings. 
 
 For pure poignancy, profundity, and weight, Elizabethan 
 lyrics will compare not unfavourably with Victorian. The 
 difference does not consist in the ore worked by the lyrists, 
 but in their way of handling it. In this latter age a poet 
 allows himself far wider scope of treatment when he writes 
 a song. He does not think of the music of voice or viol, but 
 of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of 
 the soul. The result is a wealthier and fuller symphony, 
 reaching the imaginative sense not upon the path of musical 
 sound, but appealing to the mental ear and also to that 
 ' inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.' The Victorian 
 lyric, superior in its range, suggestiveness, variety, and 
 richness, inferior in its spontaneity and birdlike intonation, 
 corresponds to the highly-strung and panharmonic instrument 
 of the poet's spirit which produced it, and to the manifold 
 sympathies of the reader's mind for which it was intended. 
 It is iridescent with the intermingled hues of fancy, con- 
 templation, gnomic wisdom, personal passion, discursive
 
 385 
 
 rhetoric, idyllic picture-painting. Modes of complicated 
 expression, involving serried reasoning, audacious metaphors 
 elliptical imagery, and rapid modulation from one key of 
 feeling to another, which a playwright like Shakespeare 
 employed only in his dramatic dialogue, find themselves at 
 home in the lyrical poetry of our age. 
 
 VI 
 
 For another point of comparison, let us take some 
 of those ' lyrical interbreathings ' in Elizabethan dramatic 
 dialogue which are surcharged with sweetness, and contrast 
 these with the sweetness of Victorian verse. I might select 
 Shakespeare's lines upon the flowers scattered by Perdita 
 in The Winter's Tale. But I prefer to choose my examples 
 from less illustrious sources. Here, then, is the sweetness of 
 Fletcher : 
 
 I do her wrong, much wrong ; she's young and blessed, 
 Fair as the spring, and as his blossoms tender ; 
 But I, a nipping north-wind, my head hung 
 With hails and frosty icicles : are the souls so too, 
 When they depart hence lame, and old, and loveless ? 
 Ah, no ! 'tis ever youth there : age and death 
 Follow our flesh no more ; and that forced opinion, 
 That spirits have no sexes, I believe not. 
 
 Here is the sweetness of Ford : 
 
 For he is like to something I remember, 
 A great while since, a long, long time ago. 
 
 Here is the sweetness of Dekker : 
 
 No, my dear lady, I could weary stars, 
 And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes 
 By my late watching, but to wait on you. 
 When at your prayers you kneel before the altar, 
 Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven, 
 So blest I hold me in your company. 
 
 Here is the sweetness of Massinger : 
 
 This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, 
 When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, 
 
 C C
 
 386 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness, 
 
 In all the bravery my friends could show me, 
 
 In all the faith my innocence could give me, 
 
 In the best language my true tongue could tell me, 
 
 And in the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, 
 
 I sued and served. 
 
 The sweetness of these passages, none of which are 
 singular, or such as may not be easily matched with scores 
 of equal passages from the same and other playwrights, is 
 like the sweetness of honey distilling from the honeycomb. 
 It falls unsought and unpremeditated with the perfume of 
 wilding flowers. Nay more, like honey from the jaws of 
 Samson's lion, we feel it to be ex forti dulcedo, the sweetness 
 of strength. 
 
 When we turn to the sweetness of Victorian poetry, we 
 rarely find exactly the same quality. In Keats it is over- 
 loaded ; in Coleridge it is sultry ; in William Morris it is 
 cloying ; in Swinburne it is inebriating ; in Shelley it is 
 volatilised ; in Wordsworth it is somewhat thin and arid ; 
 in Tennyson it is sumptuous ; in Eossetti it is powerfully 
 perfumed. We have exchanged the hedgerow flowers for 
 heavy-headed double roses, and instead of honey we are 
 not unfrequently reminded pardon the expression of jam. 
 Poets who, by happy accident or deliberate enthusiasm, have 
 at some moment come nearest to the Elizabethan simplicity 
 and liquidity of utterance, catch this honeyed sweetness best. 
 We feel that Browning caught it when he wrote : 
 
 A footfall there 
 
 Suffices to upturn to the warm air 
 Half-germinating spices ; mere decay 
 Produces richer life, and day by day 
 New pollen on the lily petal grows, 
 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose. 
 
 Tennyson produced something different when he wrote that 
 musical idyll ' Come down, maid, from yonder mountain 
 height,' which closes upon two incomparable lines of linked 
 melody long drawn out :
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 387 
 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees. 
 
 Here, as in the former instance of lyric verse, it would be 
 unreasonable to contend that Elizabethan poets surpassed the 
 Victorian. On the contrary, the latter know more distinctly 
 what they are about, and sustain the sweetness of their style 
 at a more equal level. They are capable of a more perfectly 
 even flow of sugared verse. What we have to notice is that 
 the quality has altered, and that the change is due to the 
 more involved, more concentrated intellectual conditions of 
 the later age. Poets are no longer contented with impulsive 
 expression. And as I said before, they cannot 'recapture 
 the first fine careless rapture ' of their adolescent masters in 
 the art of song. The wayward breezes and the breath of 
 wild flowers in the earlier sweetness escape them. 
 
 VII 
 
 The freedom and spontaneity of the Elizabethan age had 
 attendant drawbacks. Owing to the absence of reflection and 
 self-criticism, poets fell into the vices of extravagance and 
 exaggeration, bombast and euphuism. In their use of 
 language, the indulgence of their fancy, the expression of 
 sentiment and the choice of imagery, they sought after 
 emphasis, and displayed but little feeling for the virtue of 
 reserve. All the playwrights, without even the exception of 
 Shakespeare, are tainted with these blemishes. Jonson, who 
 was an excellent critic when he dictated mature opinions 
 in prose, showed a lack of taste and selection in his dramas. 
 There is a carelessness, a want of balance, a defect of judg- 
 ment in the choice of materials and their management, a 
 slovenliness of execution, throughout the work of that period. 
 Superfluities of every kind abound, and at the same time we 
 are distressed by singular baldness in details. What can be 
 poorer, for example, than Jonson's translations from Virgil 
 and Catullus, more clumsy and superfluous than his trans- 
 lations from Sallust and Tacitus ? Poets seem to have been 
 satisfied with saying, ' This will do,' instead of labouring till 
 
 cc 2
 
 388 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 the thing was as it had to be. They tossed their beauties 
 like foam upon the tide of tumultuous and energetic inspira- 
 tion. Yet even in this carelessness and unconsidered 
 fecundity we recognise some of the noblest qualities of the 
 Elizabethan genius. There is nothing small or mean or 
 compassed in that art. Its vices are the vices of the prodigal, 
 not of the miser ; of the genial spendthrift, whose imprudence 
 lies nearer to generosity than to wanton waste. We pardon 
 many faults for the abounding vigour which marks these 
 poets ; for their wealth of suggestive ideas, their true sym- 
 pathy with nature, their insight into the workings of the 
 human heart, their profuse stream of fresh and healthy 
 feeling. 
 
 When the Elizabethan spirit declined in England, it was 
 the business of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to 
 impose limits on all this ' unchartered freedom ' of the 
 intellect. Then the good and bad effects of critical canons 
 and academical authority came to light. We had our Dryden 
 and our Pope, our Goldsmith and Swift, our Addison and 
 Steele, our Fielding and Johnson. But we had also a 
 deplorable lack of real poetry in comparison with the foison 
 of Elizabethan harvests. If not miserly, the English genius, 
 so far as fancy and imagination are concerned, became 
 thrifty. It erred by caution rather than by carelessness. It 
 doled its treasures out like one who has a well-filled purse 
 indeed, but who is not hopeful of turning all he touches into 
 gold like Midas. 
 
 At the beginning of the Victorian age one sign of the 
 return to Elizabethanism was the license which poets allowed 
 themselves in matters pertaining to their art. Keats, in 
 ' Endymion,' Shelley, in ' The Revolt of Islam,' Byron, in 
 nearly every portion of his work, displayed Elizabethan faults 
 of emphasis, unpruned luxuriance, defective balance. It was 
 impossible, however, for the nineteenth century to be as 
 euphuistic or as chaotic as the sixteenth. Taste, trained by 
 critical education, and moulded by the writers of Queen 
 Anne's reign, might rebel against rules, but could not help 
 regarding them. In spite of these restraints, however, poets
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 389 
 
 who almost exactly reproduced the Elizabethans in their 
 blemishes and virtues, like Wells and Beddoes, poets who 
 caricatured them with a pathetic touch of difference, like 
 Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, appeared about the 
 middle of the century. And then Browning loomed on the 
 horizon, surely the brawniest neo-Elizabethan Titan whom 
 our age has seen, and whom it has latterly chosen to adore. 
 As years advanced, mere haphazard fluency grew to be less 
 and less admired ; and while keeping still within the sphere 
 of romantic as opposed to classical art, the English poets 
 aimed at chastened diction, correct form, polished versification. 
 Tennyson, who represents the height of the Victorian period, 
 brought poetic style again to the Miltonic or Virgilian point 
 of finish. In him a just conception of the work as a whole, 
 a cousciousness of his aims and how to attain them, together 
 with a high standard of verbal execution, are combined with 
 richness of fancy and sensuous magnificence worthy of an 
 Elizabethan poet in all his glory. 
 
 When, therefore, we compare the two epochs upon this 
 point of taste and style, we are able to award the palm of 
 excellence to the latter. Having lost much, we have gained 
 at least what is implied in artistic self-control, without relapsing 
 into the rigidity of the last century. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The freedom, about which I have said so much, as forming 
 the main note of Elizabethan poetry, accounts for the boldness 
 with which men of letters treated moral topics, and for their 
 clear-sighted outlook over a vast sphere of ethical casuistry. 
 Not to the spirit of that age, but to the genius of our nation, 
 I ascribe the manly instinct which guided these pioneers of 
 exploration and experience through many a hazardous 
 passage. The touch of the Elizabethan poets in such matters 
 was almost uniformly right. They may show themselves 
 gross, plain-spoken, voluptuous. We should not tolerate 
 Jonson's Crispinus, or Shakespeare's Mercutio, or Marlowe's 
 Hero and Leander at the present day. But they were not
 
 390 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 prurient or wilfully provocative. It is impossible to imagine 
 an Elizabethan Aretino, or an Elizabethan Beccadelli writers, 
 that is to say, who deliberately attempt to interest those who 
 read their works in moral garbage. Of garbage there is 
 enough in that literature, and more than enough ; but only 
 in the same sense as there were open drains and kennels in 
 the streets of London, by the brink of which high-tempered 
 gentlemen walked, and duels were fought, while dreams of 
 love warmed young imaginations, and wise debates on state- 
 craft or the destinies of empires were held by greybeards. 
 Of such kind is the rivulet of filth in Elizabethan poetry, 
 coursing, as the sewer then coursed, along the paths of men, 
 dividing human habitations. 
 
 We have forced the sewage, which is inseparable from 
 humanity, to run underneath our streets and houses. We 
 have prohibited the entrance of unsavoury topics into our 
 literature. If Marston were born again among us we should 
 stop our noses, and bid the fellow stand aloof. Even Thomas 
 Carlyle has been christened by even Mr. Swinburne, Copro- 
 stomos, or some such Byzantine title, indicating intolerable 
 coarseness. This shows how resolute we are to root out 
 physical noisomeness, and with what sincerity we prefer 
 typhoid poison to the plague accompanied by evil odours. It 
 does not prove that we are spiritually cleaner than our 
 ancestors. The right deduction is that the race has preserved 
 its wholesomeness under conditions altered by a change of 
 manners. Neither then nor now, in the age of Elizabeth or 
 in the age of Victoria, has the English race devoted its 
 deliberate attention to nastiness. 
 
 In breadth of view, variety of subject, our Victorian poets 
 rival the Elizabethan. Life has been touched again at all 
 points and under every aspect with equal boldness and with 
 almost equal manliness. But since the drama has ceased to 
 be the leading form of literature, the treatment of moral topics 
 has of necessity become more analytical and reflective. If 
 space allowed, this opinion might be supported by a com- 
 parison of the two epochs with regard to philosophic poetry. 
 In sententious maxims, apophthegms on human fate, pithy
 
 AVITH VICTORIAN POETRY 391 
 
 saws, and proverbial hints for conduct, Elizabethan literature 
 abounds. But we do not here meet with poems steeped in a 
 pervading tone of thought thought issuing from the writer's 
 self, shaping his judgments, controlling his sensations, model- 
 ling his language, forcing the reader to sojourn for a season 
 in the brain-wrought palace of his mood. For instance, 
 Shakespeare uttered the surest word of imaginative doubt, of 
 that scepticism which makes man question his own sub- 
 stantiality, when Prospero exclaimed : 
 
 We are such stuff 
 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep. 
 
 Marston in one phrase expressed man's desire to escape 
 from self, that impossible desire which underlies all reaction 
 against the facts of personal existence : 
 
 Can man by no means creep out of himself, 
 And leave the slough of viperous grief behind ? 
 
 Webster reiterated a dark conviction of man's impotence 
 in lines like these : 
 
 We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and bandied 
 Which way please them. 
 
 Yet neither these nor any other Elizabethan poets elaborated 
 their far-reaching views on life into schemes of versified 
 philosophy. We do not find among them a Shelley or a 
 Thomson. Pungent as the gnomic sentences of that age 
 may be, they have relief and background in a large sane 
 sympathy with man's variety of vital functions. The rapier 
 of penetrative scrutiny is plunged and replunged into the 
 deepest and most sensitive recesses of our being. But the 
 thinker speedily withdraws his weapon, and suffers imagination 
 to play with equal curiosity upon the stuff of action, passion, 
 diurnal interests, the woof of sentient self-satisfied existence. 
 Regarding human nature as a complex whole, those poets 
 seized on its generic aspects and touched each aspect with 
 brief incisive precision. Our poets are apt to concentrate
 
 392 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 their mind upon one aspect, and to sublimate this into an 
 all-engrossing element, which gives a certain sustained colour 
 to their work. Less rich in gnomic wisdom, they are more 
 potent in the communication of settled moods more ' sicklied 
 o'er with the pale cast of thought.' It follows that while the 
 Elizabethans had nothing of what Goethe called ' lazzaretto 
 poetry,' we have much. The affectations of our age do not 
 run toward verbal euphuism, but toward sickliness of senti- 
 ment and a simulated discontent with the world around us. 
 A man of Mr. Mallock's calibre would not have set society in 
 the sixteenth century at work upon the problem, ' Is life 
 worth living ? ' Schopenhauer and Hartmann could hardly 
 have existed then, and they assuredly would not have 
 found disciples. But in an age which produces essayists and 
 philosophers of this sort, poetry cannot fail to be introspective 
 and tinged with morbidity. Fortunately, though this is so, 
 few verses have been written by Englishmen during the 
 nineteenth century of which their authors need repent upon 
 the death-bed. 
 
 IX 
 
 The Elizabethan poets, far more truly than their Italian 
 predecessors, if we except Dante, and more truly than any of 
 their contemporaries in other countries, loved external nature 
 for its own sake. There is hardly any aspect of the visible 
 world, from the flowers of the field to the storm-clouds of 
 the zenith, from the stars in their courses to the moonlight 
 sleeping on a bank, from the embossed foam, covering the sea- 
 verge, to the topless Apennines, which was not seized with 
 fine objective sensibility and illustrated with apt imagery by 
 Shakespeare and his comrades. Yet, keenly appreciative of 
 nature as these poets were, nature remained a background to 
 humanity in all their pictures. Her wonders were treated as 
 adjuncts to man, who moved across the earth and viewed its 
 miracles upon his passage. Therefore, although imaginatively 
 and sympathetically handled, these things were lightly and 
 casually sketched,
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 393 
 
 The case is different with the literature of this century, for 
 reasons which can be stated. In the first place, our poets 
 have mostly been men leading a solitary life, in close con- 
 nection with nature, withdrawn from the busy hum of 
 populous cities. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
 Tennyson, Eossetti : it is clear, by only mentioning the leading 
 poets of our age, that this is the fact ; and to enlarge the list 
 would be to prove the point superfluously. Unlike the writers 
 of the Restoration and Queen Anne's reign, Victorian poets 
 have not breathed the atmosphere of society, the town, the 
 coffee-house. Even if they lived in London, the town, the 
 coffee-house, society had ceased to exist for them. Unlike 
 the writers of Elizabeth's and James's reigns, they have not 
 had the theatre, with its paramount interest in human action 
 and passion, its vast and varied audience, to concentrate their 
 gaze on man. And while circumstance divided them in this 
 way from what Pope called ' the proper study of mankind,' 
 the special forms of poetry they cultivated idyllic and con- 
 templative verse, lyric in its extended sense, descriptive and 
 reflective led them perforce to nature as a source of inspira- 
 tion. They worked, moreover, through a period in which the 
 sister art of painting devoted herself continually more and 
 more to the delineation of the outer world in landscape. 
 And this brings us to the decisive difference, the deep and 
 underlying reason why external nature has exercised so 
 powerful and penetrative an influence over contemporary 
 poetry. What we call science, that main energy of the age, 
 which has sapped old systems of thought, and is creating a 
 new basis for religion, forces man to regard himself as part 
 and parcel of the universe. He is no longer merely in it, 
 moving through it, viewing it and turning it round, as Sir 
 Thomas Browne delightfully said, for his recreation. He 
 knows himself to be, in a deep and serious sense, of it, 
 obedient to the elements, owning allegiance to the sun. 
 
 Even the poets of the beginning of the century, who 
 resented the impact of science most even Keats, who cried : 
 
 Do not all charms fly 
 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ?
 
 394 A COMPAEISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 bowed to the dominant spirit of the nineteenth century. 
 Keats, 'the Elizabethan born out of due time,' as he has 
 been called, kept himself indeed unspotted from the contagion 
 of science. Yet his passion for nature, moving though it did 
 on lines traced by Spenser, has a far greater intensity, a far 
 more fiery self-abandonment to the intoxication of earth, 
 than would have been possible in the sixteenth century. 
 Professor Conington used to formulate Keats' craving after 
 nature in a somewhat ribald epigram : ' Would thou wert a 
 lollipop, then I could suck thee.' The modern spirit took 
 this form of sensuous imaginative subjectivity in Keats. In 
 Byron it became a kind of lust, burning but disembodied, an 
 escapement of the defrauded and disillusioned soul into com- 
 munings with forces blindly felt to be in better and more 
 natural tune with him than men were. Shelley's metaphysical 
 mind was touched by nature to utterances of rapt philosophy, 
 which may some day form the sacred songs of universal 
 religion. ' Prometheus Unbound ' and the peroration of 
 ' Adonais ' enclose in liquid numbers that sense of spirituality 
 permeating the material world upon which our future hopes 
 are founded. Wordsworth, working apart from his contem- 
 poraries, expressed man's affinity to nature and man's depen- 
 dence on the cosmic order with greater reserve. Still, it is 
 difficult to go farther in nature-worship than Wordsworth did 
 in those sublimely pathetic lines written above Tintern Abbey ; 
 and nothing indicates the difference between the Victorian 
 and the Elizabethan touch on the world better than his blank 
 verse fragment describing a pedestrian journey through the 
 Simplon Pass. 
 
 In the course of the nineteenth century it might seem as 
 though this passion for nature the passion of Keats, Byron, 
 Shelley, Wordsworth had declined. To assume this would, 
 however, be a great mistake. What has steadily declined is 
 the Elizabethan strain, the way of looking upon nature from 
 outside. The modern strain, the way of looking upon nature 
 as congenial to man, has strengthened, but with fear and 
 rending of the heart, and doubt. The time is not yet ripe 
 for poetry to resume the results of science with imaginative
 
 WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 395 
 
 grasp. What has been called the cosmic enthusiasm is too 
 undefined as yet, too unmanageable, too pregnant with anxious 
 and agitating surmise, to find free utterance in emotional 
 literature. In our days science is more vitally poetical than 
 art ; it opens wider horizons and excites the spirit more than 
 verse can do. Where are the fictions of the fancy compared 
 with the vistas revealed by astronomers, biologists, physicists, 
 geologists ? Yet signs are not wanting I see them in some 
 of the shorter poems of Lord Tennyson, I see them in the 
 great neglected work of Eoden Noel, I see them in the 
 fugitive attempts of many lesser men than these which 
 justify a sober critic in predicting that our century's enthusiasm 
 for nature is but the prelude to a more majestic poetry, 
 combining truth with faith and fact with imagination, than 
 the world has ever known. 
 
 X 
 
 It will have been noticed that in this essay the terms 
 Elizabethan and Victorian are used with considerable laxity. 
 The object is to define two periods of English literature, the 
 one extending from Wyatt to Milton, or, roughly speaking, 
 from the year 1580 to the year 1650, the other covering the 
 whole of the nineteenth century, and dating from the publica- 
 tion of Walter Savage Lander's ' Gebir.' These two periods 
 are divided by a space of a hundred and fifty years, during 
 which our literature developed upon lines divergent from the 
 course taken by the Renaissance of the sixteenth century. 
 I have contended that Victorian literature is marked by a 
 reaction in favour of Elizabethanism, and that the general 
 scope and tone of poetry in these periods are closely similar. 
 
 Form is a matter of such prominence in art that I shall 
 perhaps be excused for recapitulating some points upon this 
 topic. During the Restoration and Queen Anne's reign, 
 versifiers lost the power and liking for that English unrhymed 
 iambic, which began with Marlowe and culminated with 
 Milton. They dropped the use of lyric measures, rarely 
 employed the sestine or the octave or the Spenserian stanza, 
 and so utterly neglected the sonnet, that even a poet of Gray's
 
 396 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN 
 
 exquisite tact was unable to produce a tolerable specimen. 
 The song became neat, terse, epigrammatic, shorn of pictur- 
 esqueness, sparkling with elegance. But the dominant metre 
 of the eighteenth century was the rhyming couplet. Poets 
 used this form with a fine sense of its point, with a sustained 
 respect for its structural limitations ; not as the Elizabethans 
 had employed it, loosely, with variety of pause and period, 
 and with frequent enjambements from one line to another. 
 The wilding graces which we appreciate in the couplets of 
 Marlowe, Beaumont, Spenser, Fletcher, were abhorred by the 
 school of versifiers at whose head stands Pope. 
 
 In close connection with these changes in the form of 
 poetry the intermediate period of a hundred and fifty years 
 exhibits a marked alteration of artistic aim and feeling. 
 Diction is corrected, luxuriant shoots are pruned ; wit, sense, 
 and taste words recurring with significant frequency in the 
 literature of the eighteenth century are cultivated at the 
 expense of imagination and capricious fancy. At the height 
 of the epoch a conceit is held in abomination, and a play on 
 words regarded as a crime. The point and polish of Pope, 
 the limpid purity of Goldsmith, the weighty eloquence of 
 Johnson, were the climax of this counter movement in our 
 literature. Didactic, satirical, epistolary compositions assumed 
 predominance under the reign of criticism, sense, restricted 
 form. 
 
 With the dawn of the Victorian age a second reaction set 
 in. It was indicated by the Rowley poems of Chatterton, the 
 lyrics of Blake, the sonnets of Bowles, the blank verse of 
 Cowper and of Landor. Then the current ran strongly, as we 
 have already seen, toward Elizabethan metres, Elizabethan 
 modes of workmanship, and ways of regarding art and nature. 
 The English Renaissance of the sixteenth century became 
 renascent in the nineteenth. 
 
 It has been the purpose of the foregoing pages to show in 
 what way this renascent Elizabethanism of the Victorian 
 epoch differs from that of the earlier period ; how the altered 
 conditions of English life, especially in the growth of great 
 cities and the emergence of grave social problems through
 
 the development of mechanical industry, have saddened and 
 subdued the tone of our poets ; how criticism and the physical 
 sciences, together with changes in religious thought, have 
 affected their outlook over the world and man ; why they 
 have become more contemplative and analytical, less spon- 
 taneous, with a tendency to pessimism, instead of the genial 
 optimism of their predecessors ; and finally to what extent 
 the absence of a commanding type of national art, like the 
 drama, has forced them into idyllic, descriptive, meditative, 
 and lyrical forms of utterance. 
 
 It is impossible to condense the net result of this comparison 
 in a single formula. Yet one of the principal conclusions to 
 which it leads us may be singled out. When we survey the 
 literatures of these two epochs, we shall be struck with the 
 generalising force and breadth of the earlier, the particularising 
 subtlety and minuteness of the latter. The Elizabethans 
 seem to sing with one voice, although the key in which their 
 melody is cast may vary. They treat of nature and of man 
 from a common point of view, albeit the world and humanity 
 affect them differently. The Victorians have each a voice 
 of his own, an attitude toward man and nature determined 
 by specific mental faculty. Each has been born something 
 separate, and made something still more separate by education. 
 Elizabethan art is instinctive, Victorian art reflective. The 
 material submitted to the workman in the one age is a com- 
 plex whole ; and this is surveyed in its superficies, seized in 
 its salient aspects. In the other age the complex has been 
 disintegrated, parcelled into details by the operation of sym- 
 pathies and intuitions proper to distinct individualities. Our 
 first question with regard to an Elizabethan is : What grasp 
 and grip does he possess upon the common stuff of art ? Our 
 first question with regard to a Victorian is : How does the 
 man envisage things, from what point of view does he start, 
 by what specific spirit is he controlled ? Thus in the nine- 
 teenth century we come face to face with individualities who 
 affect us mainly through the tone of their particular natures. 
 The poets are critical and self-conscious in creation. We are 
 critical and self-conscious in submission to their influence, in
 
 398lv ELIZABETHAN AND VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 91 
 
 estimating their achievement. This intimate and pungent 
 personality, settling the poet's attitude toward things, mould- 
 ing his moral sympathies, flavouring his philosophy of life 
 and conduct, colouring his style, separating him from 
 fellow-workers, is the leading characteristic of Victorian 
 literature that which distinguishes it most markedly from 
 the Elizabethan. 
 
 While many points have been passed in review much has 
 naturally been omitted, and the method of treatment has 
 necessitated the suppression of important modifications. It 
 would in the one case have been interesting to raise the 
 question how far Puritanism influenced the national tone in 
 literature : whether, for example, the abeyance into which 
 music fell after the Commonwealth had anything to do with 
 the decline of song and spontaneous melody. It would have 
 been desirable in the second case, while treating of Eestora- 
 tion, Queen Anne, and Georgian poetry, to have qualified 
 some sweeping statements by an examination of a lyrist like 
 Gray, and to have shown to what extent the three main 
 periods marked out shade into one another at their edges. 
 But two Greek proverbs, no less than want of space, warn me 
 to lay down the pen here. ' Nothing overmuch,' ' The half 
 is better than the whole.'
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 DAKWIN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT GOD 
 
 No small interest attaches to the religious opinions of a man 
 who influenced our thoughts about the world so much as the late 
 Charles Darwin did. His biography, written by his son Francis 
 Darwin, contains a chapter on Religion, in which some valuable 
 details are communicated. 1 I do not think that more ought to be 
 desired or expected from a man of Darwin's stamp than the sus- 
 pended judgment which concludes his trenchant and yet cautious 
 utterances upon the subject of theology. ' The safest conclusion 
 seems to me that the whole subject is 'beyond the scope of man's 
 intellect ; but man can do his duty.' 2 Having arrived at the 
 opinion that ontology is hardly a fit topic for the human reason, 
 Darwin states his own attitude in the following modest phrases : 3 
 
 What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to any 
 one but myself. But as you ask, I may state that my judgment often 
 fluctuates. ... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an 
 Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that 
 generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an 
 Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind. 
 
 It is clear from this quotation that Darwin did not accept 
 Atheist and Agnostic as convertible terms. If we collect the sense 
 of all his dicta upon the relation of the world to a Divine Being, 
 we shall perceive that he regarded a God as the most reasonable 
 hypothesis, but that many things in the order of the universe, ' the 
 increased amount of suffering through the world,' 4 for instance, 
 were obstacles to his maintenance of this hypothesis in full faith. 
 What he meant by Agnosticism appears to have been an indecision 
 
 1 Vol. i. cap. viii. 2 P. 307. 3 P. 304. 4 P. 307.
 
 400 APPENDIX 
 
 as to the definition of God, and a profound doubt as to the power 
 possessed by man of reaching Him. One paragraph from his 
 letter dictated in answer to a German student puts this very 
 plainly : 1 
 
 He considers that the theory of Evolution is quite compatible with 
 the belief in a God ; but that you must remember that different persons 
 have different definitions of what they mean by God. 
 
 Critical investigation of the so-called evidences of Christianity, 
 and the comparison of other religions, brought him to a practical 
 abandonment of revelation. 2 He felt that the immortality of the 
 soul has to be regarded as an open question. 3 He discussed Pes- 
 simism with a clear perception of its ground and issues ; and on 
 the whole he pronounced himself a moderate Optimist. 4 He re- 
 jected the subjective or sentimental ' argument for the existence of 
 an intelligent God, drawn from the deep inward conviction and 
 feelings which are experienced by most persons.' 5 At the same 
 time, he recorded his opinion that the argument drawn from 
 reason was more cogent with his mind. He could not bring him- 
 self to regard ' this immense and wonderful universe, including 
 man, with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into 
 futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity." 6 In like 
 manner the argument derived, partly from subjective instinct, 
 partly from reason, for the immortality of the soul, had consider- 
 able weight with him. 7 His chief doubt, in valuing these argu- 
 ments from instinct and reason, was whether the mind of man can 
 be trusted to draw any conclusions in the matter. 8 Returning at 
 last to the point from which we started, he declares : 9 ' I cannot 
 
 1 P. 307. 
 
 2 P. 307, ' For myself,' etc. P. 308, ' But I had gradually,' down to 
 ' had some weight with me.' 
 
 3 P. 307, ' As for a future life,' etc. 
 
 4 P. 307, ' Nor can I overlook,' etc. P. 309-11, ' Some writers 
 indeed,' down to ' variation and natural selection.' 
 
 5 P. 312, ' Formerly I was led,' etc. 
 
 6 P. 312. Compare p. 306, ' But I may say that the impossibility,' 
 etc. Also p. 316, ' Nevertheless, you have expressed,' etc. 
 
 7 P. 312, ' With respect to immortality,' down to ' will not appear so 
 dreadful.' 
 
 8 P. 313, ' But then arises the doubt,' etc. P. 316, ' But then with 
 me the horrid doubt,' etc. 
 
 9 P. 313. '-
 
 APPENDIX 401 
 
 pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The 
 mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us ; and I for 
 one must be content to remain an Agnostic.' 
 
 What Darwin meant by being an Agnostic seems pretty clear 
 now ; and it is also pretty clear why he felt sometimes that he 
 ' deserved to be called a Theist.' J 
 
 Agnostic is the vague denomination for a genus including 
 several species. According to their temperament or to their earlier 
 associations, Agnostics lean either to Atheism or to Theism. They 
 agree in pronouncing the problem of the universe to be insoluble ; 
 but they are variously coloured by divers inclinations toward the 
 faiths they have abandoned. One is an Optimist by natural bent, 
 another is a Pessimist. But ' their common link is a certain nega- 
 tive relation to creeds they formerly professed. Among Agnostics, 
 Darwin leant toward Theism. Habit, instinct, and reason drew 
 him in that direction. It was long before he worked off his early 
 belief in revelation, and the nature of that belief continued to 
 qualify his reasoning when he entertained theological speculations. 
 
 I gather from several passages in this chapter that Darwin 
 never transcended the conception of Deity as Providence, as a 
 designing Person, with purpose in each detail of creation. 2 These 
 passages are in part directed against teleology. But they also 
 show that their author still thought of God from Paley's point of 
 view. 3 He continued to regard God as the theologians of English 
 orthodoxy made Him as a being constructing the world from 
 outside, planning its contrivances and directing each event to a 
 calculated end. Darwin never speaks as though the conception of 
 Deity immanent in the universe were tenable. 
 
 For example, he remarks that while he (Darwin) is designedly 
 shooting a bird in order to obtain food, the lightning is destroying 
 a good man. ' Do you believe,' he asks, ' that God designedly 
 killed this man ? Many or most persons believe this : I can't and 
 don't.' Here a dilemma is stated : either God made the lightning 
 kill a good man in the same way as I killed a bird, or He did not. 
 It does not occur to him that there is no dilemma except upon his 
 own assumption that God directed the flash of lightning with the 
 providential design of killing the good man, just as he (Darwin) 
 discharged his gun with the purpose of killing the bird. Then he 
 
 1 P. 312, ' When thus reflecting,' &o. 
 
 2 P. 313, ' The mind refuses,' down to p. 316, ' existed in the moon.' 
 
 3 This is confirmed by a very emphatic confidence about Paley in a 
 letter to Sir John Lubbock. Life, vol. ii. p. 219. 
 
 D D
 
 402 APPENDIX 
 
 proceeds to another instance : ' If you believe so (i.e. that God 
 designedly killed this man), do you believe that when a swallow 
 snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow 
 should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant ? I 
 believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. 
 If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no reason 
 to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily 
 designed.' All through this reasoning he argues on the hypothesis 
 that God must have used the lightning in the destruction of 
 the man and the swallow in the death of the gnat with the same 
 kind of purpose as that with which the sportsman uses his 
 gun. This proves, I think, thai he had not come to reflect on the 
 notion of Deity without a remnant of Paleyism. He argued, as no 
 other man had equal right to argue, against current conceptions of 
 design in Nature and special providences in physical occurrences. 1 
 But the old habit of regarding God only as Providence, only as 
 Designer, prevented him from seeing that, so far as God or the 
 order of the universe is concerned, lightning, swallow, and sports- 
 man stand precisely upon one level with regard to the good man, 
 gnat, and pheasant they respectively destroy. The difficulties 
 which lie in the way of regarding the universe as the sport of 
 chance were manifest to Darwin. His reason demanded a supreme 
 Law a God of some sort ; but Paley's extra-mundane God still 
 haunted him, and prevented him from ever entertaining the notion 
 that God may be Himself the supreme Law and Life of the 
 universe. Would such a God be personal ? Agnostics leaning to 
 theism are not bound to answer that question. No theologies 
 have made us comprehend what a personal God means. We do 
 not know what personality actually is, either in ourselves or in any 
 other being ; yet the idea of God, regarded as the Law and Life of 
 the universe planned we know not how, and pursuing its develop- 
 ment on paths beyond the ken of human senses and intelligence 
 accords with Darwin's own dictum : 2 ' The theory of Evolution is 
 quite compatible with the belief in a God.' 
 
 1 See in particular p. 309, ' Although I did not think,' down to 
 ' which the wind blows.' 
 4 P. 307.
 
 APPENDIX 403 
 
 THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 NOTHING is known by human beings which is not in the con- 
 sciousness of collective or individual humanity in the mind of the 
 race or of the person. 
 
 What this means is, that man cannot get outside himself, 
 cannot leap off his own shadow, cannot obtain a conception of the 
 universe except as a mode of his own consciousness. He is man, 
 and must accept the universe as apprehended by his manhood. 
 
 It does not therefore follow that what man knows is the 
 universe. It does not follow that man's sense and thought create 
 the outer world. It does not even follow that the laws of human 
 consciousness are the laws of Being. The utmost we are justified 
 in saying is, that man forms an integral part of the world, and that 
 his consciousness is consequently a substantial portion of the 
 whole. 
 
 All that Philosophy can do is to analyse the mass of human 
 thoughts and feelings, to ascertain the limits within which we 
 apprehend the world, and to show the direction in which our 
 faculties may be applied. Philosophy must abandon ontological 
 explanations of the universe. These have invariably proved their 
 own futility, being successively left behind and superseded in the 
 progress of relative science, by which is meant the development of 
 human thought and knowledge about the world. 
 
 The science of God and the science of Being, Theology and 
 Ontology, have no foundation except in the subjectivity of man. 
 Both are seen to involve impertinences, naivetes, solemn self- 
 complacences, the egotism of Narcissus doting on his own perfec- 
 tions mirrored in the darkness of the river of the universe. 
 
 This does not preclude a sincere belief in man's power to obtain 
 partial knowledge of the world. Such knowledge, so far as it goes, 
 rests on a firm basis ; for man is, ex hypothesi, an integer in the 
 universe, and his consciousness accordingly represents a factor of 
 the universal order. The mistake of theology and ontology is to 
 transfer this partial knowledge to the account of the whole. These 
 self-styled sciences are only doing what polytheism and mythology 
 did. They are attempting to account for the whole by the experi- 
 ence of a part of it, which experience varies according to the stages 
 of the growth of the creature we call man. 
 
 It may be demanded of me, then, why, holding these views, 
 
 DD 2
 
 404 APPENDIX 
 
 professing the Agnostic creed, I speak of God as Law, brought back 
 to us by modern science ? 
 
 The answer is simple. It rests upon the root -conception that 
 man, in all his qualities, but most essentially in the highest part of 
 him, his mind, forms a real portion of the world. Being a portion, 
 he cannot apprehend the whole : to do that was the pretension of 
 theologians and ontologists. Yet this part, this man, raised to self- 
 consciousness, increasing always in his grasp on partial knowledge, 
 is brought continually more and more into the presence of a Force, 
 a Life, a Being, call it what you will, which he is bound to recognise 
 and worship as the essence which fashioned him and which keeps 
 him in existence. 
 
 Man has the right to use time-honoured language, and to 
 designate his apprehension of the unity in Nature by that vener- 
 able title, God. He is only doing now what all the men from 
 whom he is descended did before him. Mumbo Jumbo, Indra, 
 Shiva, Jahve, Zeus, Odin, Balder, Christ, Allah what are these 
 but names for the Inscrutable, adapted to the modes of thought 
 which gave them currency ? God is the same, and His years do 
 not change. It is only our way of presenting the unknown to 
 human imagination which varies. 
 
 We are at liberty to leave God out of our account, and to 
 maintain that we can do without this hypothesis. But how shall 
 we then stand ? We must remain face to face with the infinite 
 organism of the universe, which, albeit we can never know it in 
 itself, is always being presented to our limited intelligence as more 
 completely and organically one. The mystery flies before us, 
 and will ever fly. The more we say we know, and the more we 
 really know, the less can we afford to omit the elements of 
 unsearchableness and awe-inspiring unity which have produced 
 religions. 
 
 In these circumstances we are led back to the primitive con- 
 ditions of human thought. We must still acknowledge a power 
 from which we spring, which includes all things, which is the real 
 reality of all we partly grasp by knowledge. Evade it as we will, 
 we are driven to the conclusion, at which the earliest men arrived, 
 that human intelligence alone is insufficient to account for the 
 universe, and that there is a Something beyond, with which man 
 is indissolubly connected, and which has to be approached in the 
 spirit of devotion. This Something, now as then, compels reverence 
 and inspires awe. We may call it God or not as we think fit. 
 Meanwhile it subsists the one paramount fact, in comparison with
 
 APPENDIX 405 
 
 which all other facts are unimportant. It is variously envisaged 
 by successive generations, according to the tenor of their sensi- 
 bilities and the nature of their speculation. Was there ever, or is 
 there now, any other God but this ? 
 
 The augmentation of knowledge only increases our sense of the 
 reality and inscrutability of Being. Science and Agnosticism are 
 therefore paths whereby we are brought back to religion under 
 forms adapted to present conceptions of the world we live in, and 
 of which we are a part. 
 
 To these reflections I append (without fear of trespass) some 
 verses, in which the same thoughts have found emotional utterances. 
 They were suggested by the problems of death and doubtful immor- 
 tality, than which none other rack the heart of man in his impo- 
 tence and ignorance more cruelly : 
 
 Since none returns to us upon the way 
 
 Which leads through darkness to the land of light. 
 
 What of that perilous journey can we say ? 
 
 Nothing. We watch the frost of sickness blight 
 Our darlings : blood and nerve with age grow weak ; 
 And sleep prepares our soul for endless night. 
 
 Were it not well to take our ease, nor seek 
 An answer to the question all will ask ? 
 Against the bars of pitiless death we break 
 
 Those soaring wings, which no ethereal task 
 Of poet or of sage hath taught to stoop. 
 Surely 'twere well beneath the sun to bask, 
 
 Like flowers to bloom, like flowers to fade and droop, 
 Drinking the dews of morning and of eve. 
 Bank after rank dim generations troop 
 
 Down to the grave. The very rose we weave 
 Into a garland for the brow we love, 
 Has blood within it ; to the petals cleave 
 
 The scent and hues of human clay. Above 
 Yon mountain tops, what once were tears distil 
 In fleecy rain, making the streams whereof 
 
 Men drink. Oh, cease, with weak, persistent will 
 To storm the heights of nature. 'Tis enough 
 That living, suffering, we must climb the hill. 
 
 Make the plain ways of life less stern and rough : 
 Build not cloud-castles on the inconstant air ; 
 Nor strive in vain to cast the viperous slough
 
 406 APPENDIX 
 
 Of fate that clings around these limbs so fair. 
 Kiss the rod rather ; learn to face the doom 
 Which we with all things that have beauty share. 
 
 The world we breathe in is a chrysolite, 
 
 No chance, no dreadful drift of dateless days 
 
 May tarnish. Those long ages infinite 
 
 Which wafted us over unfooted ways, 
 
 When from dim whirling vapour sun and earth, 
 
 And all the spheres that in their cycles blaze, 
 
 Grew into being with a gradual birth, 
 
 These shall endure, though all men 'neath the sod 
 
 Turn a deaf ear alike to grief and mirth. 
 
 We know not elsewhere any other God 
 Than that which permeates the living whole, 
 Alike in sentient clay and senseless clod. 
 
 Call it Power, Motion, Life, Creator, Soul. 
 There is no name for force that over nerve 
 And granite sweeps with absolute control, 
 
 Compelling germs invisible and curve 
 Of comet to the one resistless law, 
 Wherefrom the noblest creature cannot swerve, 
 
 Nay, nor the meanest. Overmastering awe 
 Sublimes the sort of man that thinks and feels, 
 When toward the source of life he never saw, 
 
 With genuflection meek he trembling steals, 
 Divining in the void a Yea and Nay, 
 Godhood akin to Manhood, which reveals 
 
 Beyond the night of death a dawn of day. 
 Nor blame we man, if mid the weltering sea 
 That rings him round with impotent dismay, 
 
 He crowd those chasms of immensity 
 
 With phantoms of his own trail thought, and cry 
 
 To what seems loftiest in things low as he. 
 
 It may be that we shall not surely die : 
 
 It may be that the powers to whom we pray, 
 
 Are waiting in the calm crystalline sky 
 
 To breathe by death these clouds of life away , 
 Yet were it wasteful, think you, in the span 
 Of endless things, if what was once mute clay,
 
 APPENDIX 407 
 
 Should for some few years be a vocal man, 
 
 Then turn to inarticulate dust again ? 
 
 Look up. "Tis night. The ceaseless caravan 
 
 Of stars innumerous across the plain 
 
 Of heaven, we know not whence, we know not whither, 
 
 In long continuous procession strain. 
 
 Add glasses to your aching eyes, and wither 
 
 The sense of seeing with perpetual toil : 
 
 In those faint films a million globes together 
 
 Stream onward ; deep by deep the skies recoil ; 
 And all the unpeopled gulfs with suns are rife. 
 Then ere your spirit falters, trim the oil 
 
 In midnight lamps ; peruse the hidden strife 
 One drop of water, like a mimic world, 
 Constrains within its sphere ; the throbbing strife, 
 
 The palpitating blood-beats. Life is hurled 
 Hither and thither reckless on the tide 
 Of Being : yet the basest worm encurled 
 
 Within a tortured sinew hath not died 
 Save by some dread immutable decree. 
 Life's continuity no flaws divide, 
 
 Nor lapse, nor languor. On the restless sea, 
 Whereof our souls are waves a little while, 
 There is no room for death : it cannot be. 
 
 Here cease ; aspire no more ; seek not to pile 
 Dust of delusion on your heart's despair. 
 Faith, Instinct, Science, Hope, can but beguile 
 
 Your ignorance with guesses light as air. 
 
 It may be, is your limit. Life may be 
 
 But Thought, your Thought, the terrible and fair, 
 
 Clasping the universe inviolably ; 
 And you, victorious in the overthrow 
 Of all that clogs and cramps mortality, 
 
 May be as God. Him, knowing not, we know : 
 Him from the blackness of our self's abyss 
 We cry to, when the shadows round us grow. 
 
 This hope is yours ; but ah, you know not this !
 
 408 APPENDIX 
 
 NOTES ON THEISM 
 
 IT is possible for a man to be a theist in the etymological sense of 
 that word, i.e. one who feels that the whole of his own and the 
 world's interests are bound up with the idea of Theos God and 
 yet not to acknowledge himself a theist in the sense given to the 
 word by professed theists, such as the Rev. Mr. Voysey, who lifts 
 his voice in England now. 
 
 I am not prepared to predicate so much of God as they do ; nor 
 do I think that we have arrived at that stage of knowledge in which 
 a new definition, satisfying human needs and authoritative for 
 human wills, can be given to the complex notion Deity. Unless 
 the idea of God should ultimately be eliminated from the stock of 
 human concepts, it must be remoulded to suit the changes which 
 have taken place in our theory of the universe. The time is still 
 far off before that can be effected ; and the process, if it is to lead 
 to serious belief, must be a very gradual and instinctive act of 
 assimilation carried on in the minds of multitudes and masses. 
 
 Meanwhile professed theists seem to retain more of the theo- 
 logical systems they are undermining than is justified by logic. 
 They ought surely to abstain from such ways of thought as find 
 expression hi phraseology like ' God's purposes,' ' God works out 
 His gracious ends.' To attribute personality to God is to attribute 
 something which has significance only in relation to man's pheno- 
 menal existence. This does not prevent us from believing that 
 mind and moral consciousness are somehow essential factors 
 in the universe ; for this reason, that we find them present and 
 paramount in man i.e. in the only portion of the universe we 
 are really acquainted with. But we are not hereby pledged to 
 the corollary that God must be a Person, a righteous Judge, 
 a loving Ruler, a Father. The words I have italicised cease 
 to be significant when we pass in imagination beyond the range of 
 human relationship. 
 
 Theism, lika Unitarianism, is a necessary phase in the process of 
 disintegration, which must be gone through before the new process 
 of assimilation and integration can commence. It is our duty to 
 regard with deep interest and respect all attempts to base religion 
 upon sounder foundations, all schemes for facilitating the transition 
 from mythological Christianity without loss of religious fervour, all
 
 APPENDIX 409 
 
 efforts to accommodate the sanctities of religious reverence with the 
 earnestness of scientific seeking after truth, all heartfelt endeavours 
 to worship God, ' not on this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,' but 
 literally ' in spirit and in truth.' 
 
 II 
 
 What sensible man can doubt that we must, for the present, at 
 all events, acquiesce in suspension of judgment with regard to the 
 nature of the Supreme Being ? 
 
 Let us remember that all attempts to present God to the 
 imaginative reason have been, are, and will ever be nothing better 
 than symbols of an unknown, unknowable power. This will render 
 the exercise of patience, now demanded from us as the proof of faith, 
 more easy. What we are called upon to do, is to get on as well as 
 we can through life and in death, not indeed without faith, but 
 without the definite symbolic forms which made faith comfortable 
 to our forefathers. 
 
 The revolution in all our conceptions of the world which has 
 been performed during the last three centuries is so tremendous, that 
 no dogmatic theology of any sort can gain a hold upon our minds. 
 At this stage, it is surely enough if, having displaced the old con- 
 ception of an extra-mundane Creator, who governed a universe 
 which had man for its centre, we have not thereby abandoned 
 the belief in God. Quis Deus incertum ; est Deus. Let us, in 
 reverence and humility, retain our religious attitude. Let us, so 
 far as we are able, refer our aspirations to God, as the only Life, 
 the only Love, the only Law, the ground of all Eeality, the source 
 of all Being. So long as we do this, we keep alive the sacred 
 flame in Vesta's temple of the human heart, and march in the 
 procession of saints, martyrs, and confessors. What must of 
 necessity remain at present blank and abstract in our idea of God 
 may possibly again be filled up and rendered concrete when the 
 human mind is prepared for a new synthesis of faith and science. 
 That, in its turn, will have to be decomposed like elder, simpler 
 syntheses ; and so forth perpetually, until the inevitable day of 
 Gotter-Dammerung, the day of dying for our planet, comes. 
 Meanwhile for man, through all these transformations of the 
 religious idea, abides one motto fixed : roiis a>vras fv dpavy ' while 
 living do thy duty.' ' 
 
 1 These words were written before the publication of Darwin's Life, 
 vol. i. p. 307. See p. 399, above.
 
 410 APPENDIX 
 
 III 
 
 What constitutes a theist in this age is that a man should be 
 prepared to render up himself in faith and submission to God that 
 is, to the order of the world, however little he may hope to under- 
 stand it, and whatever his lot in it may have to be. Different ages, 
 involving different states of knowledge and different experiences of 
 human life, are forced to regard the one all-being, all- sustaining 
 inscrutable God in divers ways. David did not invent his God, 
 nor Sophocles his, nor St. Paul his, nor Cleanthes his, nor Marcus 
 Aurelius his, nor Mahomet his. No ; God was found by these men, 
 revealed to these men, thus and thus and thus. Yet some discoveries, 
 some revelations of God, are more consistent with the contemporary 
 possibilities of Theism than others. It is easier for us to cry with 
 David : ' O put thy trust in God ; for I will yet give Him thanks, 
 who is the help of my countenance and my God ! ' It is easier for 
 us to say with Sophocles : ' Oh, that my lot may lead me in the path 
 of holy innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws 
 ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which 
 Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget 
 them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God 
 is mighty in them, and groweth not old.' l It is easier for us to 
 pray with Cleanthes : ' Lead thou me, God, and thou Law, the 
 daughter of God, whithersoever I am by you appointed to go ; for I 
 will follow unreluctant ; or should I refuse through sin or cowardice 
 upgrown in me, none the less shall I follow.' It is easier to exclaim 
 with Marcus Aurelius : ' Everything harmonises with me which is 
 harmony to thee, O Universe I Nothing for me is too early nor too 
 late which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which 
 thy seasons bring, Nature ! from thee are all things, in thee are 
 all things, to thee all things return. The poet says, " Dear city of 
 Cecrops " ; and wilt not thou say, " Dear city of God " ? ' 2 It is 
 easier, I repeat, to think and feel with these men than to cast our all 
 of faith upon the die thrown by St. Paul : ' If Christ be not risen, 
 then is our preaching vain.' It is not true that we are ' of all men 
 most miserable,' even though Christ be not risen, even though we 
 shall not rise. Utterances like this of St. Paul, however serviceable 
 they may have been in a past age, lead mankind awry now 
 from the more virile religion, the purer, the deeper, the more 
 
 1 Translated by Mr. Matthew Arnold. 
 " Translated by Dr. George Long.
 
 APPENDIX 411 
 
 indestructible, which bids men trust in God even though he slay 
 them, body and soul. 
 
 IV 
 
 ' Vain, shallow, and unthinking optimist ! Inconclusive agnostic ! 
 You reject St. Paul's theism. Well, but how will the theism of 
 your chosen prophets sound the bottomless abysses shown to us by 
 modern science ? They knew nothing of those immeasurable gulfs 
 and distances, that time, that space, those unhomely haunts of 
 human thought with nothing human in them of all such things 
 they knew nothing at all, your David, Sophocles, Cleanthes, Marcus 
 Aurelius. You, who have the insight granted by three centuries of 
 exploration, how is your theism going to deal with the incalculable 
 aeons of the cosmic origins inanimate chaos, slowly stirring into 
 fiery strife of gaseous vortices and clashing atoms the tardy 
 concentration of sidereal systems, in furious combustion first, then 
 cooling to white-furnace glow, then building solid planets with 
 their crust of rock and spilth of water, half-dead themselves, but 
 heated by fire belched from the living sun ; the long, stern struggle 
 for existence among things which breathe upon our tiny globe ; 
 the procession of species evolved by laws of which they were 
 unconscious, doomed successively to supersede and to exterminate 
 the weaker ? How will your theism square with this ? Next, 
 how will any theism, yours or your prophets', or St. Paul's, or 
 Mahomet's, or Buddha's, adapt itself to the facts of human 
 experience to the omnipresence of evil and disease, to the dreadful 
 lives lived by the majority of men since men appeared upon this 
 planet, to the anguished misery of captives and convicts, to the 
 clash between natural appetite and social law, to the morbid 
 torments of moral madness and slow-fretting physical cancers, to 
 the unutterable lusts and cruelties and loathsomeness of your own 
 heart, to the dumb, blind, ignorant agonies of dread and longing 
 and self-accusation and hopeless helplessness with which you 
 labour in the dark night-watches, before which you quail in the 
 presence of cold, implacable nature-forces? How will your theism 
 adapt itself to this ? Is it not ridiculous for you to prate of God ? 
 Nay, the superior personalities, whom you imagine to exist, scale 
 over scale, ascending immeasurably far above you in the hierarchy 
 of life, are they not also under the same doom as you, creatures 
 of the same relentless law, enveloped in the same impermeable 
 gloom of ignorance and futile yearning ? ' 
 
 I have often listened to this voice, and said not a word. There
 
 412 APPENDIX 
 
 is no answer. But the soul is illogical, indomitable, unconquerable, 
 haughtily affronting fate, knowing itself to be the last and best 
 thing knowable by men, in spite of all these desolating, dread- 
 inspiring, freezing, heart-breaking billows of the infinite which 
 surge around its rock in darkness. Poor, illogical, indomitable 
 soul of man ! She cries to God in the world- storm, yields to God, 
 drowns in God, finds no other God than this. 
 
 KaXel 8' aKOvovras ovStv 
 'Ev Hf<ra 8v<r7raA.e7 re Siva. 
 
 ' Nay, but the soul cries to those who listen not, caught in the 
 clutches of whirlpools with which it were too vain to wrestle. 
 Who hath heard God speak ? To whom hath God responded ? ' 
 Perchance that is the fact. Perchance none listens. Perchance 
 the whirlpools will close over us and suck us down. If there is a 
 God, we shall not cry in vain. If there is none, the struggle of 
 life shall not last through all eternity. Self, agonised and tortured 
 as it is, must now repose on this alternative. 
 
 THE CEITEBION OF ART 
 
 IN works of art, only what is in a true sense human will be found 
 finally good and permanent. It must be agreeable to the normal 
 perceptions of human beings who are capable of understanding and 
 appreciating art. The test of excellence must be a common sense 
 or agreement of opinion between normal men and women gifted 
 with ato-tirjo-is or sensuous perception. 
 
 It may, parenthetically, be remarked that all perception is 
 sensuous. We cannot perceive the truth that two and two make 
 four without acquiring experience of duality through one or other 
 of the senses. We cannot grasp the meaning of language without 
 the help of hearing, of eyesight, of sense of touch. By far the 
 larger number of our expressions for mental or aesthetic qualities, 
 as taste, gout, gusto, GeschmacJc, flair, fiuto, tact, sensibility, 
 comprehension, are transferred from the region of the senses and 
 used metaphorically. 
 
 The common perception of normal men and women, who are 
 not insensible to beauty, not impervious to ideas, will ultimately 
 decide the question whether any work of art is first rate, second 
 rate, or worthless.
 
 APPENDIX 413 
 
 This common perception is not the sense of the majority at any 
 moment. Contemporaries are notoriously inadequate to judge with 
 accuracy. It was only a small minority who appreciated Shelley 
 and Keats in their lifetime. 
 
 It is not even the sense of the whole world at any given epoch. 
 For instance, we are now sure that Gothic architecture possesses 
 eminent qualities ; and in the fourteenth century no other style was 
 considered beautiful. But Palladio and Wren, with the consent of all 
 cultivated persons in Europe, judged it barbarous. What is there 
 in common between L. B. Alberti and Pugin on the subject of 
 pointed architecture ? 
 
 Each individual has but a limited perceptive faculty, and this is 
 still further limited by the prevalent state of the age in which he 
 lives. 
 
 It follows that a final verdict regarding works of art can only 
 be arrived at very slowly, and after considerable variations of 
 opinion among those even who are the best qualified to judge. 
 The consensus regarding Homer, Pheidias, Virgil, Dante, Shake- 
 speare, now amounts to certainty. The agreement about a poet like 
 D. G. Bossetti has not reached that point. A man who utters 
 authoritative opinions for or against Bossetti carries the weight 
 only of his own perception, backed up in either case by the per- 
 ceptions of a limited number of men who feel like him. In the 
 long-run, Bossetti will be definitely placed by the accumulation of 
 such perceptions. 
 
 The greatest art communicates the greatest amount of satisfac- 
 tion to the greatest number of normal human beings through the 
 greatest length of time. Inferior art, the art of a Merino in poetry 
 or of a Bernini hi sculpture, may enjoy temporary applause. But 
 even during the furore it creates, men of pure and trained percep- 
 tion will recognise its inferiority to the art of Ariosto and Michel 
 Angelo. Art of first-rate quality may never win more than limited 
 applause, because it appeals to highly specialised perceptions ; but 
 it is sure, in the lapse of ages, to win ' fit audience, though few.' 
 Popularity implies the adaptation of the work to aggregate per- 
 ceptions. Beally corrupt art is only adapted to corrupt perceptions, 
 and in a corrupt age it may be popular. It cannot maintain this 
 popularity, for the final court of appeal is the Areopagus of 
 sound and normal human beings. These will unanimously reject 
 Merino and accept Shakespeare. They may differ about Bossetti ; 
 yet it is much to have obtained a minority of votes from the 
 Areopagus.
 
 414 APPENDIX 
 
 I will conclude with a simile. The final verdict about works of 
 art and men of genius may be compared to one of those composite 
 photographs (devised by Mr. Francis Galton T ) which are obtained 
 by the superposition, one above the other, of many negatives taken 
 from different individuals. Each separate face has left its filmy 
 impress on the composite photograph; and all the faces have 
 contributed to form a type the type of a criminal, the type of a 
 consumptive person, the type of a certain family. Blurred in some 
 of its outlines and details as the ultimate result may be, such a 
 composite photograph has an unmistakable generic individuality, 
 which is even more instructive, even more convincing for the 
 student of criminal, consumptive subject, specific family, than the 
 mere aggregate of single photographs which compose it. It yields, 
 not the person, but the type. Even so the final verdict of criticism 
 is the total result of countless personal judgments, superimposed, 
 the one above the other, coalescing in their points of agreement, 
 shading off into blurred outlines at points of disagreement, but 
 combining to produce a type which is an image of fundamental 
 truth. 
 
 NOTE ON 'REALISM AND IDEALISM' 
 
 THE inevitable infusion of a subjective element into every attempt 
 made by men to reproduce nature, on which I have insisted with 
 reference to figurative art, may be still further illustrated. It 
 appears in all reports made by credible witnesses of events which 
 have been noticed by them. A precisely identical account cannot 
 be expected by ten witnesses of the same occurrence, though each 
 has been anxious to relate the literal truth. Furthermore, it is 
 impossible to obtain exactly similar reports of such reports from 
 every ten veracious persons who have heard one or more of them 
 from the lips of original witnesses. Thus the element of sub- 
 jectivity in the primary reports is multiplied in the secondary 
 accounts transmitted of the fact. When there exists a strong sub- 
 jective prepossession on the part of the witness, then the event 
 becomes spontaneously idealised in a definite direction. The con- 
 currence of several such subjective prepossessions, colouring the 
 
 1 ' Inquiries into Human Faculty,' p. 340.
 
 APPENDIX 415 
 
 report of an event which is extremely interesting to all the 
 witnesses concerned, results in an ideal which comes to be accepted 
 for the literal fact. 
 
 This is perhaps the proper explanation of miraculous occurrences 
 attested by fairly good evidence. The genesis of those potent ideals 
 which give force to religions may, in like manner, be referred to 
 subjective faculties exercised by many witnesses in sympathy. 
 We find it difficult, for example, to interpret the Gospels without 
 postulating the existence of an historical Christ. But given that 
 basis of reality, the large element of idealism in the Gospels can 
 be comprehended by this hypothesis of subjective intervention 
 without ascribing mala fides to the witnesses. In the redaction of 
 several parallel reports to one coherent narrative, the subjective 
 element was not eliminated, but intensified and harmonised upon 
 certain lines. The ideal which formed a factor in each separate 
 report obtained substantiality. In this way four main ideal 
 portraits of Christ were produced, which have been subsequently 
 elaborated into one highly idealised conception by the slow con- 
 tinuous process of centuries. 
 
 II 
 
 Another instance might be chosen from a different region. 
 History has been contemptuously called the chronicle of lies and 
 illusions. In so far as this is true, it results from the impossibility 
 of seeing facts except through our own senses and the reports of 
 other persons. The data of history arrive to us coloured by sub- 
 jectivity ; and the historian, eager as he may be to eliminate the 
 truth, judges the material he has to deal with through the medium 
 of his personal impressibility. Thus a contemporary history, like 
 Kinglake's ' Crimean War,' cannot be written without bias. The 
 greater the art-work, the more energetic the attempt to realise, the 
 keener the effort to extract fact from inferences and statistics, the 
 more imaginative and idealistic will the product be. In this way 
 we are led to the conclusion that the past can never be known to 
 us except in its broadest, simplest outlines. The crossing, blend- 
 ing, interminglement, and quasi-chemical combination of divers 
 subjectivities which any chapter of history implies, render the 
 attempt to reach pure truth impossible. Yet we must not, there- 
 fore, on this account, despair of history. Persistent endeavour in 
 the direction of reality, in the sublimation and elimination of 
 subjective elements, brings us to a residuum which has at least its 
 own generic authenticity.
 
 416 APPENDIX 
 
 III 
 
 In other departments of literature, notably in romance and 
 fiction, the same principles hold good. We have heard much 
 lately of realistic novels. But even Zola, with his notebook and 
 his catalogues of objects, is compelled to idealise, because he cannot 
 seize reality except as a mode of his own sensuous and mental 
 being. There are as many ways of perceiving and conceiving fact 
 as there are individuals. A novel cannot be the exact representa- 
 tion of reality, because it must be the representation of what some 
 human being finds in reality. This has been tersely and vigorously 
 put by M. Guy de Maupassant in the preface to his ' Pierre et 
 Jean.' 1 'How childish, moreover,' he exclaims, 'to believe in 
 reality, since we each carry our own in our thought and in our 
 organs ! Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing 
 from one person to another, create as many truths as there are 
 men upon earth. And our minds, taking instruction from these 
 organs, so diversely impressed, understand, analyse, judge, as if 
 each of us belonged to a different race. Each one of us, therefore, 
 forms for himself an illusion of the world ; and the writer has 
 no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion, with 
 all the contrivances of art that he has learned and has at his 
 command.' 
 
 In the main, this doctrine carries conviction. Yet M. de 
 Maupassant must be taken to task for one or two exaggerated 
 statements. It is not childish to believe in reality because the 
 individual cannot perceive it or reproduce it without the admixture 
 of his subjectivity. It is not true that there are as many truths as 
 there are men upon the earth ; else the delusions of maniacs, who 
 mistake a wreath of yellow paper for a crown of gold, or a dirty 
 cotton gown for the bridal robe of a daughter of Zion, would be 
 truths ; else colour-blindness would rank on equal terms with com- 
 plete vision. Nor conversely is it true that the conceptions which 
 we each of us form of the world are merely illusions. The fact is, 
 that we do believe in reality, although we admit our inability to 
 seize it or express it except in terms of our own thought and senses. 
 The fact is, that we are capable of distinguishing normal from 
 abnormal impressions of reality, and that only the former have 
 any lasting value for us. The fact is, that while we recognise a 
 
 1 I quote from Mr. Henry James's translation, Fortnightly Review, 
 March, 1888, p. 366.
 
 APPENDIX 417 
 
 certain element of inadequacy, a certain admixture of illusion, in 
 all subjective perceptions and in all subjective renderings of reality, 
 we are well aware that some are nearer to the truth than others. 
 Dante's and Shakespeare's, Eaphael's and Pheidias's impressions 
 of reality, though tinctured with subjective colours, appeal to our 
 sense of truth more forcibly than Marino's and Cyril Tourneur's, 
 than Fuseli's and Bernini's. If it were not so, criticism would be 
 impossible, and humanity would have to renounce its claim to 
 common sense. The pursuit of knowledge, even of such relative 
 knowledge as mankind can hope for, would have to be abandoned 
 as absurd. We should not be able to communicate with one 
 another in the expectation of being understood. We should be 
 precluded from legislating for the common benefit of society. The 
 human race would be reduced to an aggregation of isolated world- 
 making monads. 
 
 Truth lies in the avoidance of paradoxical extremes. Full 
 recognition of the play of subjectivity in individuals must not 
 blind us to the fact that, over and above and independent of this 
 subjectivity, we are conscious of a standard relation to reality, by 
 reference to which we are enabled to form judgments. The race 
 is larger than the individuals which compose it ; and constant 
 appeal must be made to the common from the personal 
 perception. 
 
 This being the case, criticism finds, when it surveys the several 
 products of any marked historical epoch, that they present more 
 notes of similarity than of difference. The notes of difference 
 belong to individual artists ; the notes of similarity belong to the 
 period which produced them, and the tribe from which they sprang. 
 Having ascertained the specific note belonging to a particular epoch, 
 criticism compares this with the note of other equally differentiated 
 epochs. At this point the generic note emerges, that which con- 
 stitutes humanity at large. From such studies, whereby a standard 
 has been gained, criticism returns to the consideration of species 
 and particulars. The specific falls into its place of relation to the 
 generic, and the individual is inspected as subordinated to the 
 species which he helps to integrate. 
 
 Subjectivity holds sway throughout the process. The particular 
 sees reality through the spectacles of self. The species sees it 
 through spectacles of race and period. Mankind sees it through 
 spectacles of generic human properties. Neither particular, nor 
 species, nor yet genus eliminates the subjective element or repro- 
 
 E E
 
 418 APPENDIX 
 
 duces reality. Transmutation into human stuff or idealisation is 
 the condition under which man works. 
 
 NOTE ON 'THE MODEL' 
 
 THE female form has less variety than the male. It cannot 
 symbolise so many modes of vigorous existence. There are several 
 positions which it cannot assume with grace as in the act of 
 running, the spreading abroad of the limbs, and wherever the belly 
 and pelvis are extended by physical effort. Raphael, in his drawing 
 of Eoxana visited by Alexander, and in his fresco of Venus rising 
 in her car, upon the Farnesina ceiling, adopted graceless female 
 attitudes. No Greek artist, so far as I remember, fell into this 
 fault of showing how the female figure sprawls. The Greeks took 
 pains to drape or partially drape women in their statues ; or when 
 they modelled the nude, they selected attitudes of self -restrained 
 repose or of marked sexual suggestiveness attitude of self-restraint 
 in the Venus de' Medici, attitude of sexual suggestiveness in the 
 Venus Accroupie. 
 
 If we divest ourselves of sexual associations, we shall recognise 
 that the male is more ready-made in plastic quality to the artist's 
 hand, more capable of varied posturing, more representative of 
 human energies and activities. It requires less management in 
 order to bring out its qualities and tone down its defects. 
 
 On the other side, the female presents finer suavities of contour, 
 higher elements of voluptuousness. There are numerous modes of 
 emotion all the tender, imploring, shrinking, languishing, seductive, 
 yielding, timid, wavering modes which the female expresses, and 
 which are inappropriate to the male. 
 
 The activity of the male, the passivity of the female, are seen in 
 their respective physical types. The male is classical, the female 
 romantic. The male is sculpturesque, the female musical. 
 
 Thus it is chiefly when the body is used as an index of human 
 activity, vigorous capacity, ebullient passion, solid strength, that the 
 male predominates in art. Organically, as an instrument of action, 
 it is far more potent and more varied in resources. 
 
 But when we use the body as the index of human susceptibilities, 
 sensibilities, allurements, in this less active and less intellectual 
 region the female asserts predominance.
 
 APPENDIX 419 
 
 Michel Angelo treated the female nude (especially in his Night 
 and Dawn at San Lorenzo) in the male key ; and obtained some 
 noticeable tragic effects therefrom. 
 
 Praxiteles treated the male nude (especially in his Apollo 
 Sauroktonos and the Neapolitan torso of Bacchus) in the female 
 key, and obtained some noticeable sensuous effects therefrom. 
 
 Artists of a (i.) distinctly intellectual order, like Michel Angelo 
 and Signorelli, use the male nude for decorative purposes roof of 
 Sistine Chapel, arabesques at Orvieto. Artists of a (ii.) sensual 
 type, like Correggio, use either the .hermaphroditic male for 
 decorative purposes (Parma cupolas) or the female ; as indeed do 
 all decorators of theatres, baths, places of enjoyment built for 
 men. The first class of artists appeal to a sublime and abstract 
 sense of form ; the second, to natural instincts. 
 
 Draughtsmen like Bartolozzi have treated the male and female 
 nude together in a mixed key, sacrificing the essential qualities of 
 each, not to an animal desire, but to a flaccid sentiment, which 
 marks the decadence of art. This is not the case with antique 
 hermaphroditic statues. These consciously confuse the male and 
 female keys, employing a Mixo-Lydian mood, for purposes of 
 undisguised voluptuousness. 
 
 The colourist gets silvery tones from the female, tawny tones 
 from the male ; smooth surfaces and soft chiaroscuro fromthe 
 female, abrupt lights and shades with angular modelling of surface 
 from the male. 
 
 He does best who utilises these sexual differences by properly 
 accentuating the contrasts of male and female. But a Guido 
 may give us a middle region for the male, which is the region 
 of adolescence. See his Samson at Bologna. Praxiteles again 
 may do the like. See his Hermes at Olympia, where adolescence, 
 not hermaphroditism, is suggested. To go beyond this in 
 attributing female qualities of tone and surface to the male is 
 hazardous, though it is sometimes very effective, as, for instance, 
 in Bazzi's St. Sebastian. 
 
 PEIOEITY OF THOUGHT TO LANGUAGE 
 
 IT is a pernicious delusion to suppose that language creates 
 thought more than thought creates language. The contrary is 
 true. This may be exemplified from the Platonic philosophy. 
 
 2
 
 420 APPENDIX 
 
 Plato saw that in language there were both good and goodness, 
 particular and abstract quality of good. He rightly inferred an 
 idea corresponding to the abstract, and recognised goodness as a 
 thought expressed by language. Upon this perception he founded 
 his theory of ideas. What is weak in that theory is the extension 
 of abstract thought expressed in language to thoughts which have 
 no abstract equivalents in language. He saw there was an idea of 
 goodness as apart from good ; so he said there was an idea of 
 horseness as apart from horse. Here, instead of language creating 
 thought, thought seeks to s create a language not in use among 
 men. That is an extreme instance. But it might amply be 
 shown that thought, in all its complex stages, forces language in 
 order to obtain expression. The phraseology of metaphysics, from 
 Aristotle downwards, abounds in examples of the concrete being 
 warped to serve the abstract. After asserting this, I do not deny 
 the reflex action of language upon thought, the fettering of thought 
 by language which has once been fixed, and very often badly fixed, 
 to adumbrate some stage of painfully emergent thought. Meta- 
 phorical expressions of all sorts, indicating the shifts of thought to 
 find utterance, are instances. But these confirm the view that 
 thought is prior to language. 
 
 COLOUR-SENSE AND LANGUAGE 
 
 THE sense of colour cannot be judged by colour-nomenclature. 
 
 People, in a primitive state of society, may be acutely sensitive 
 to colours, as indeed they have all their senses in fine working order, 
 and yet may have no names to denote the shades of hue. 
 
 This is due mainly to the fact that colours are not connected 
 with utility. The brain is lazy, and only coins words which are 
 necessary. It can dispense with a wide vocabulary for pigments, 
 since these involve no grave concerns of life or business. 
 
 Suppose the currency were established, not on varying weights 
 of precious metals, but on varying tints of red, blue, yellow ; then 
 we should soon find a nomenclature springing up to denote the 
 finest gradations of those colours. 
 
 That is not the case. In the early stages of civilisation, colour 
 involves neither affairs of life and death, nor affairs of property.
 
 APPENDIX 421 
 
 Language, therefore, leaves it alone, at least such language as enters 
 into literature. 
 
 Xenophanes describes the rainbow by the simplest generic 
 words : 
 
 fov Kal fyoivintov Kal 
 
 But while this scientific man was so describing it, practical 
 workmen were weaving all the colours of the rainbow into 
 Athene's peplus. Those workmen must have known how to ask 
 for dyes at the colourman's. Perhaps they used phrases like 
 Venetian red, chrome yellow, verditer, epinards vomis, cadmium, 
 burnt sienna, Vandyke brown, merda d'oca, umber, peacock blue ; 
 phrases, that is to say, which even now scarcely show their heads 
 in literature. 
 
 Persian poetry affords a parallel instance. It deals with colour 
 broadly, by generalities, by salient tones arresting simple attention. 
 Yet Persian carpets exhibit the finest blending of the most subtly 
 matched and graduated tints. And the older these carpets are, the 
 more are they prized for their exquisite solution of problems in the 
 art of colour. 
 
 With the advance of civilisation to the point which we have 
 reached, the nomenclature of colours becomes more rich, but 
 always, as it were, by haphazard. We talk of pinJc, lilac, mauve, 
 magenta, lemon, fawn, dove, peacock, gris de perle, always using 
 metaphors from natural objects, or the mere lingo of commerce. 
 And even these words to express tints of colour are employed with 
 diffidence in literature, although literature has grown reckless in 
 its exercise of means for appealing through language to the intellect, 
 and summoning up pictures for the mental eye. 
 
 We are at a different point with regard to colour from that 
 which primitive peoples occupied. The art of painting, critically 
 examined and reflected on, has forced us to distinguish hues. 
 Widely extended commerce in articles of dress and furniture has 
 made its language current. Literature has passed into a descriptive 
 and pictorial stage. Science has drawn attention to the value. 
 which colours possess for the discrimination of substances and the 
 analysis of tissues. Lastly, we have discovered that our lives and 
 deaths depend on colour-blindness, through the employment of 
 coloured lights as railway signals. 
 
 It would be little short of miraculous if, under these influences, 
 the susceptibility to tints of colours, and the corresponding nomen- 
 clature to denote them, were not largely augmented.
 
 422 APPENDIX 
 
 Our experience, however, must not make us draw a wrong con- 
 elusion from the poverty of language to express colour in earlier 
 ages of civilisation. As it is, we have no proper nomenclature 
 only such as we pick up from commerce and the colour-men. The 
 shifts we submit to in order to communicate sensations of colour 
 ought rather to teach us that in the Homeric or other early ages 
 colours were fully appreciated by the senses, but had not found 
 their analogues in language.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABGARUS, epistle of, 71 
 
 Academy, 360 
 
 Acting, art of, 91 
 
 Addison, 388 
 
 ^schylus, 39-40, 178, 219, 255, 
 
 319, 322 ; quoted, 38, 179 
 Agathon, dramatist, 40-1 
 Agnosticism, 400-4, 411 
 Albert!, L. B., 413 
 Alfieri, 222 
 Allegories, 300-14 
 Amadeo, architect, 84 
 Ambrose, St., 187 
 Anacreon, 348 
 Angelo, Michel, 47, 58, 80, 84, 101, 
 
 105, 124, 136, 143, 146, 149, 163, 
 
 222, 340, 343, 413, 419 
 Anne, Queen, 369, 388, 393, 395, 
 
 398 
 
 Anthropology, 29 
 Apocrypha, 33 
 ' Arabian Nights,' 159 
 Arber, Prof., 380 
 Arcadius, 187 
 Archilochus, 235 
 Architecture, 44-6, 50, 100, 102, 
 
 138, 342, 413 
 Aretino, 106, 161, 390; quoted, 
 
 155-6 
 Ariosto, poet, 50, 195, 282, 320, 
 
 328, 345, 358, 360, 363, 370, 413 ; 
 
 quoted, 351, 357-8 
 Aristarchus, 61 
 Aristodemus, 252 
 Aristophanes, 107, 156, 158, 235 ; 
 
 quoted, 178 
 Aristotle, 41, 149, 175, 181, 420 ; 
 
 quoted, 56, 58, 61, 90, 118, 123-4, 
 
 150, 153 ; interpretation of, 69- 
 
 70 
 
 Arnold, Sir Edward, 377 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 197, 216, 229, 
 297; on Wordsworth's poetry, 
 315-16, 319-327, 340; quoted, 
 335, 379 
 
 Art, evolution in, 6-9, 27-52 ; criti- 
 cism of, 67-8 ; ; in relation to 
 science and morality, 95-107 ; 
 realism in, 111 seq. ; beauty, 
 composition, &c., in, 137-154 ; 
 caricature in, 155-165 ; obscenity 
 in, 160-3 ; democratic, 237-268 ; 
 landscape, 269-99 ; music the 
 type of all, 335-344 ; the criterion 
 of, 412-14 
 
 Arthur, King, 308 
 
 Arts, provinces of the, 79-94, 151 
 
 Arundel Society, 54 
 
 Ascham, 366 
 
 Astronomy and religion, 3-4 
 
 Atheism, 16, 399 
 
 Athens, 107 
 
 Attic Drama, 31, 38-41 
 
 Augustine, St., 187 ; ' Confessions 
 of,' 191-3 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 119, 411 ; quoted, 
 410 
 
 Ausonius, poet, 188, 192, 345-6, 
 352-364; quoted, 273-6; 'Idyl 
 on the Eose,' 347-50 
 
 Ausonius, Gregorius, 274 
 
 Austen, Jane, 374 
 
 Autotype Company, 130 n. 
 
 BACH, 101 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 76, 211, 868, 372 
 
 Baffo, poet, 164 
 
 Balzac, 51, 238 
 
 Barnes, 377
 
 424 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Barnfield, 368 
 
 Bartolozzi, painter, 135, 419 
 
 Basaiti, painter, 282 
 
 Baudelaire, poet, 317 
 
 Bayley, Thomas, 559, 363 
 
 Bazzi, sculptor, 419 
 
 Beaumont, dramatist, 34, 49, 381, 
 
 396 
 
 Beccadelli, post, 317, 390 
 Beddoes, poet, 374 n., 389 
 Beethoven, 90, 340 
 Bellini, Gian, 46, 54, 57, 116 n. 
 Bembo, poet, 74, 105, 195 
 Bernini, sculptor, 413, 417 
 Bible, 210-11, 230, 368-9 ; inter, 
 pretation of the, 69 ; criticisn of 
 the, 72 
 
 Bible Society, 191 
 Biology and evolution, 2, 5, 27-9 
 Bion's ' Lament for Adonis,' 350 n. 
 Bissolo, painter, 282 
 Blake, William, 24, 54, 57, 115, 
 136, 222, 267, 396 ; quoted, 301 
 Boccaccio, 49, 104, 195, 230, 234 
 Boiardo, poet, 49, 282 
 Boileau, 61, 238 
 Bolingbroke, Lord, 119 
 Bologna, 419 
 Bologna, Gian, 101 
 Bondasca, glaciers of, 300-1 
 Bonifazio, painter, 143 
 Borgia, Eoderigo, 109 
 Borromeo, Carlo, 106 
 Bossuet, 232, 235 
 Boswell's ' Life of Johnson,' 222 
 Botticelli, painter, 46, 49, 54 
 Bourget, Paul, 201 ; quoted, 200 
 Bowles, poet, 396 
 Boyle, Hon. Mrs. E. C., 345, 359, 
 
 360, 363 
 
 Bramante, architect, 84 
 Bronzino, painter, 49 
 Brougham, Lord, 232 
 Brown, Dr., 158 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 211, 213, 
 
 225 ; quoted, 100, 212, 393 
 Browning, Mrs., 368, 377-8 
 Browning, Eobert, 297, 368, 374 n., 
 
 375, 378, 389 ; quoted, 386 
 Brunelleschi, architect, 84 
 Bruno, Giordano, 2, 4, 26, 106, 
 
 286-7, 290 
 Buchanan, Eobert, 366, 377 
 
 Buddha, 252, 411 
 Buffon, quoted, 277 
 Bullen, A. H., 380 
 Buonarroti, 104 
 Burke, Edmund, 235 
 Burne-Jones, painter, 314 
 Burns, Eobert, 324 
 Burton, 211 
 
 Byron, Lord, 219, 238, 297, 322, 
 328-333, 368-88, 393-4 
 
 CALLIMACHUS, 229 
 
 Calvin, 69 
 
 ' Cambyses,' play, 34 
 
 Camden, 366, 368 
 
 Campanella, poet, 105 ; quoted, 
 260-1 
 
 Campbell, poet , 368, 382 
 
 Caracci, Annibale, 54-5, 57 
 
 Caricature in art, 155-65 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 230, 233, 390 
 
 Carpaccio, painter, 54 
 
 Gary's ' Dante,' 377 
 
 Castasegna, 300-1 
 
 Castelfranco, 282 
 
 Castiglione, 106 
 
 Cato, 229 
 
 Catullus, 272, 348-52, 357-60, 363, 
 387 ; quoted, 345-6 
 
 Cellini, Benvenuto, 82, 101, 106, 
 233 
 
 Cervantes, 61, 235 
 
 Chseremon, dramatist, 40-1, 270 
 Chapman, 368 ; ' Homer,' 374 
 Characterisation in art, 137-154 
 Charles H., 245 
 Chartres Cathedral, 84, 102 
 Chatterton, poet, 396 
 Chaucer, poet, 368-9 
 Cheke, 036 
 
 Cherubini, composer, 101, 343 
 Chillingworth, 211 
 Chopin, composer, 101 
 Christian dogma, 10, 16 
 Christianity, 2-3, 19 ; astronomy 
 and, 3 ; evolution of, 5, 19-21 ; 
 and allegory, 309 seq. 
 Cicero, 70, 187-8, 193, 221, 230, 
 
 235, 370 ; quoted, 166 
 Cima, painter, 282 
 Claudian, poet, 187, 192, 276
 
 INDEX 
 
 425 
 
 Cleanthes (the Stoic), 9, 10, 18-19, 
 
 411 ; quoted, 410 
 Clough, A. H., 267, 368, 376-7 ; 
 
 quoted, 378 
 
 Cochin, M. Henry, 327 
 Coleridge, S. T., 297, 329, 368, 371, 
 
 376, 383, 386, 393 
 Colet, 366 
 Collier, 371 
 
 Composition in art, 137-154 
 Compte, Augusts, 25 
 Conington, Prof., 394 
 Constantine, 71 
 Contarini, 106 
 Copernicus, theory of, 2-3, 281, 
 
 287 
 
 Cordegliaghi, painter, 282 
 Corinth, 308 
 Corneille, 219 
 Cornwall, Barry, 382 
 Correggio, painter, 6, 47, 282, 419 
 Cowper, poet, 289, 396 
 Crabbe, 264, 266, 326, 375 
 Cratinus, 252 
 Criticism, 6-9 ; principles of, 
 
 53-78 
 
 Crowne, dramatist, 36 
 Culture, philosophy of, 7 
 
 DA FABKIANO, Gentile, 281, 282 n. 
 
 da Vinci, Lionardo, 47, 100, 112, 
 129, 142, 145, 156, 282 
 
 Dancing, art of, 91 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 364 
 
 Dante, 24, 104, 149, 157, 194, 218, 
 235, 319, 322, 344, 392, 413, 
 417; 'Divine Comedy,' 61-2, 
 279-80, 375 ; ' Paradise,' 164 
 
 Darley, 374 n. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 7, 27 ; ' Life of,' 
 28 n., 399-402, 409 n. ; ' Origin 
 of Species,' 71 ; his thoughts 
 about God, 399-402 
 
 Darwin, Francis, 399 
 
 Darwinism and theology, 10, 27-8, 
 71 
 
 D'Aumale, Due, 134 
 
 Davenant, dramatist, 9, 34, 36, 49 
 
 David, King, 411; quoted, 202, 
 410 
 
 David, artist, 125 
 
 de Foix, Gaston, 142 
 
 de' Medici, Cosimo, 106 
 
 de' Medici Giovanni, 106 
 
 de' Medici Lorenzo, 127, 356, 358, 
 
 360 ; quoted, 352-4 
 de Musset, 238 ; quoted, 254-5 
 de Quincey, on style, 227-232 
 Death, 17-18, 405 
 Defoe, Daniel, 264 
 Dekker, dramatist, 267, 368; 
 
 quoted, 370, 385 
 Del Carretto, Ilaria, 142 
 Del Sarto, Andrea, 47, 143 
 Delacroix, 238 
 Democritus, 70, 308 
 Demosthenes, 142, 181, 232, 235 
 Determinism, 22-3 
 Dickens, Charles, 374 
 Diodati, 191 
 Dionysius, painter, 124 
 Dobell, Sydney, 389 
 Dobson, 377 
 Dor6, Gustav, 222 
 Dossi, Dosso, painter, 57 
 Dostoieffsky, 267 
 Dowden, Prof., 25 n. 
 Drama, evolution of the, 33-41, 
 
 49 
 
 Drummond, 368 
 Dryden, 101, 171, 213, 235, 323, 
 
 369, 382-8 ; quoted, 183 
 Dudley, Lord, 134 
 Diirer, Albert, 129, 281, 282 n. 
 
 ECKEEMANN, 146, 222 
 
 Elgin marbles, 54, 121-3 
 
 Eliot, George, 158, 267, 374 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 75, 365 
 
 Elizabethan drama, 33-8 
 
 poetry, 365-398 
 
 Emerson, 220 
 
 Ennius. 229 
 
 Euripides, 40-1, 56, 123, 180, 320 
 
 Evolution, philosophy of, 1-26 ; 
 and religion, 2-4, 400-2; of 
 the mind, 14- 15 ; in art and 
 literature, 6-9, 27-52 ; in sculp- 
 ture, 41-2 ; of the drama, 
 33-41 
 
 FAIRFAX, 360, 374 
 Farnesina, 134, 418
 
 426 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 51, 388 
 Filelfo, 366 
 
 ' Fioretti di San Francesco,' 198 
 Fischer, Kuno, 65 
 FitzGerald. Edward, 377 
 Flandrin, artist, 130-3 
 Flaubert, Gustav, 227-8, 379 
 Fletcher, dramatist, 34, 36, 219, 
 
 368, 381, 396 ; quoted, 385 
 Florence, 116 n. 
 Ford, dramatist, 36, 381 ; quoted, 
 
 385 
 Fortnightly Review, 335-339 n., 
 
 416 n. 
 
 Fra Angelico, painter, 6, 54-5, 81 
 Fra Bartolommeo, painter, 46, 49, 
 
 143 
 
 Fra Lippo Lippi, painter, 46 
 Francia, painter, 282 
 Fuseli, painter, 121, 417 
 
 GALILEO, 281, 286 
 
 Galton, Francis, 29, 414 
 
 Gautier, Theophile, 238, 316 
 
 Geology, 27-9, 64 
 
 Gherardo, 193 
 
 Ghirlandajo, painter, 49 
 
 Gibbon, 222, 235 ; quoted, 172, 224 
 
 Gifford, 371 
 
 Gilray, caricaturist, 156 
 
 Giordano, painter, 163 
 
 Giorgione, painter, 47, 112, 161, 
 282 ; ' School of,' 335 
 
 Giotto, painter, 46, 55, 57, 104, 146 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 232-3; on 
 Homer, 69 
 
 Gluck, composer, 343 
 
 Goethe, 2, 51, 219, 222, 235, 289, 
 297, 322 ; on God and nature, 1 ; 
 on criticism, 6, 8 ; Proemium to 
 'Gott und Welt,' 26, 290; on 
 art, 79 ; ' Werther,' 238 ; on his 
 poems, 312 ; ' Faust,' 313, 372 ; 
 on poetry, 315, 340 
 
 Goldoni, 222 
 
 Goldschmidt, Madame, 382-3 
 
 Goldsmith, 51, 388, 396 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 377 
 
 Gotthelf's ' Ulrieh,' 267 
 
 Grande Chartreuse, 293-4 
 
 Gray, poet, 289, 395 ; quoted, 293-4 
 
 Greene, dramatist, 9, 35, 39 
 
 Greuze, painter, 101 
 
 Guarini, poet, 345 ; ' Pastor Fido,' 
 
 244, 360 ; quoted, 360-2 
 Guest, Dr., 76, 207 
 Guicciardini, historian, 195 
 Guido, painter, 57, 419 
 
 HALLAM'S ' Literature of Europe,' 8 
 Handel, composer, 382 n., 383 
 Hardy, Thomas, 267 
 Hartmann, 392 
 Haydon's ' Autobiography,' quoted, 
 
 121-3 
 
 Hazlitt, 371 ; quoted, 153 
 Hegel, 2, 164, 203, 288, 320 ; on 
 
 mind, 11, 52, 65 
 Heine, Heinrich, 197, 205-6, 219, 
 
 235, 238, 321 ; quoted, 382 
 Helmholz, 205 
 Hemans, Mrs., 382 
 Henniquin, Emile, 218 n., 221 n. 
 Henry VII., 365 
 Henry VUL, 365 
 Heraclitus, 70, 308 ; quoted, 62-3 
 Herodotus, 180, 233, 235 
 Herrick, poet, 271, 328, 345, 368, 
 
 380-1 ; on poetry, 315 ; quoted, 
 
 364 
 
 Heywood's ' Interludes,' 34, 267 
 Hogarth, 264, 266 
 Homer, 57, 229, 235, 255, 269, 
 
 316, 319, 321, 351, 375, 413; 
 
 interpretation of, 69 ; quoted, 
 
 176, 181 
 Honorius, 186 
 Hood, poet, 382 
 Hooker, 230 
 
 Horace, 61, 190, 272, 280, 319 
 Home, 374 n. 
 Hughes, William, 37, 75 
 Hugo, Victor, 219, 222, 235, 238 
 Humility, 22 
 Hunt, William, 115 
 Huxley, Professor, 28 
 
 IDEALISM and Realism, 108-127, 
 
 414-18 
 
 Immortality, hope of, 18, 405 
 Ingres, painter, 57, 129 
 Intellect (see under Mind) 
 Italian Eenaissance, 103-7
 
 INDEX 
 
 427 
 
 JALALU 'D DIN, poet, 303-4 
 
 James I., 366, 393 
 
 James, Henry, 416 n. 
 
 Jerome, St., 187-8, 191, 210, 283 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 230, 388, 396; 
 
 ' Life of,' 222 
 Jones, Ebenezer, 377 
 Jonson, Ben, 36-7, 211, 213, 368, 
 
 381, 387, 389 ; ' Poetaster,' 229 
 Joubert, quoted, 119 
 Julius II., 106 
 Juvenal, 184, 235, 272 
 
 KANT, 65, 288 ; quoted, 153 
 Keats, 295, 297, 326, 329, 368, 371, 
 
 375-6, 382, 386-8, 392-4, 413; 
 
 quoted, 383, 393 
 Khayyam, Omar, 316-17, 377 
 ' King Darius,' play, 34 
 Kinglake's ' Crimean War,' 415 
 Kipling, Eudyard, 267 
 Klopstock, poet , 323 
 Knowledge, the limits of, 403- 7 
 Kyd, poet, 35 
 
 LAERTIUS, Diogenes, 70 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 371 
 
 Landor, W. S., 313, 343, 368, 
 
 374 n., 375, 395-6 
 Landscape in Literature and Art, 
 
 269-299 
 
 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 158 
 Lang, Andrew, 363, 377 
 Languages, 174-216 
 Lempriere, 314 
 Leopardi, 317, 322-3, 326, 328, 
 
 378 ; quoted, 195-8, 219 
 Lesage, 61 
 Lessing, 147, 238 
 Life, mystery of, 5, 405 
 Linton, W. J., 380 
 Literature, evolution in, 6-9, 
 
 27-52 ; province of, 91 seq. 
 Livy, 184, 187-8, 235 ; ' Discourses 
 
 upon,' 104 ; quoted, 202 
 Lodge, poet, 35 
 Long, Dr. George, 410 n. 
 Longinus, 61 
 
 Lorenzetti, painter, 343-4 
 Lorraine, Claude, 281, 283 
 Loti, Pierre, 267 
 
 Lotze, 65 
 Lucan, 273 
 Lucca, 142 
 
 Lucretius, 164, 271, 317 
 Luini, painter, 54 
 Luther, Martin, 191 
 Luxembourg, 130 
 Lycophron, 229 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 27 
 Lyly, 230 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, 229, 230, 235; 
 
 quoted, 225 
 Machiavelli, 104, 194-5, 233, 235, 
 
 318 
 
 Mahomet, 410-11 
 Mallock, Mr., 392 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 369, 375 ; 
 
 quoted, 209-10 
 
 Mantegna, painter, 46, 54, 343 
 Marino, poet, 50, 57, 164, 230, 413, 
 
 417 
 Marlowe, dramatist, 34-9, 367-8, 
 
 374, 389, 395-6 ; quoted, 140-1, 
 
 209 
 Marston, poet, 368, 390 ; quoted, 
 
 391 
 
 Martial, 272 
 Mary, Queen, 365 
 Mason, painter, 267-8 
 Massinger, dramatist, 36 ; quoted, 
 
 385-6 
 Maupassant, Guy de, quoted, 200, 
 
 416 
 
 Mazzini, 332 
 Meleager, poet, 273, 317 
 Mendelssohn, 101 
 Menoikeus, 252 
 Meredith, George, 374 
 Michelet, 236 ; ' Histoire de France,' 
 
 233 
 
 Milan, 142, 187, 192-3 
 Mill, John Stuart, 222, 232 
 Millet, painter, 267-8 
 Milton, 164, 213, 235, 361, 395 ; 
 
 ' Paradise Lost,' 75-6, 207, 375 ; 
 
 quoted, 101, 153, 158, 340, 382; 
 
 on marriage, 211-12 
 Mind, importance of, 11, 12, 17; 
 
 definition of, 12-14 ; evolution 
 
 of, 28-9 
 Miracle-plays, 33-4
 
 428 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Miracles, 4 
 
 Model, the, 113, 119-122, 128-136, 
 
 144, 418-19 
 Moliere, 319, 322 
 Molza, poet, 105 
 Mommsen, 235 
 Mont Cenis, 293 
 Mont Ventoux, 193, 301 
 Monte Zocco, 300 
 Moore, poet, 382 
 More, Sir Thomas, 366 
 Morland, 264 
 Morris, William, 297, 368, 386; 
 
 ' Earthly Paradise,' 313, 377 
 Morrison, J. Cotter, 20 n. 
 Mozart, 58, 90, 101 
 Muretus, 221 
 Musasus, 70 
 Music, province of, 82 seq., 100-1, 
 
 138, 151 ; the type of all art, 
 
 335-344 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., 287 n, 338-9 n. 
 Myths, 300-14 
 
 NAPLES, 87 
 
 Napoleon I., 371 
 
 Nash, poet, 35 
 
 National Style, 174-216 
 
 Nature Myths and Allegories, 300- 
 
 14 
 
 Neri, Filippo, 106 
 New Testament, 186 
 Newman, Cardinal, 232, 377 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 27 
 Nimmo, J. C., 380 n. 
 Nisard, M., 215 
 Noel, Boden, 297, 377-8, 395 
 Norton, dramatist, 37 
 Novalis, quoted, 89 
 Novel, evolution of the, 51 
 
 OKEN, 8 
 
 Oliphant, Thomas, 380 
 
 Olympia, 419 
 
 Orvieto, 419 
 
 Ovid, 271-2; quoted, 351-2 
 
 PAINTING (see under Art) 
 
 Paley, 401-2 
 
 Palladio, architect, 45, 413 
 
 Palma, junior, painter, 57 
 
 Parma, 282 n. 
 
 Parthenon, the, 84, 87, 122-3, 139, 
 
 179, 185 
 Pascal, 136 
 
 Pater, Walter, 340-2 ; ' School of 
 Giorgione,' 335 seq. ; quoted, 381 
 Pattison, Mark, 213-15 
 Pauson, painter, 124 
 Pavia, 344 
 Peele, poet, 35 
 Pembroke, Lord, 75 
 Pericles, 127 
 Persius, 235, 272 
 Perugino, painter, 6, 46, 54, 80, 
 
 282 
 Petrarch, 105, 193, 195, 222, 230, 
 
 301 
 
 Pheidias, sculptor, 31, 42, 48, 57, 
 70, 80, 101, 107, 123, 126-7, 139, 
 145, 179, 255, 268, 413, 417 
 Philostratus, 273, 348 
 Phocion, 142 
 Phrynichus, 39, 41 
 Pindar, poet, 178-9, 182, 319, 321 ; 
 
 quoted, 52 
 
 Plato, 181, 420; interpretation of, 
 69, 70, 107, 180; quoted, 90, 102, 
 140, 153 ; on poetry, 319-20 
 Plautus, 229 
 Plutarch, 70, 233 
 
 Poetry, sphere of, 89, 91-102, 131, 
 151, 164, 289, 339 ; Elizabethan 
 and Victorian, 231 n., 365-398 ; 
 Pathos of the Rose in, 274 n., 
 345-64 ; a criticism of life, 315- 
 34 
 
 Poggio, 366 
 
 Poliziano, poet, 106, 195, 215, 282, 
 328, 345, 358, 360, 366 ; qiioted, 
 354-7 
 
 Polygnotus, painter, 124 
 Pontano, 366, 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 119, 167, 235, 238, 
 289, 339, 372, 388, 396, quoted, 
 288, 393 
 
 Portugal, Cardinal of, 142 
 Poussin, Gaspar, 54, 281, 283 
 Poussin, Nicholas, 281, 283 
 Praxiteles, sculptor, 42, 179, 298, 
 
 419 
 
 Procter, 374 n. 
 Psalms, quoted, 202, 410
 
 INDEX 
 
 429 
 
 Ptolemy, 3 
 Pugin, 413 
 Pulci, poet, 49 
 Punch, 156 
 Pythagoras, 70 
 
 QUINTILIAN, 188 
 
 RABELAIS, 235 
 
 Racine, 219 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 367-8, 380 
 
 Raphael, 47, 54, 80, 101, 112, 129, 
 
 134, 145-6, 163, 282, 339, 417- 
 
 18 
 Realism and Idealism 108-127, 
 
 414-18 
 Regnier, 235 
 Religion, 96 ; and astronomy, 3-4 ; 
 
 and science, 9, 10, 16, 405 ; 
 
 optimism of, 18 ; evolution of, 
 
 19-21, 76; and art, 101, 120, 
 
 145 ; Darwin's thoughts on, 399- 
 
 402 
 
 Religions, nature of, 2-5, 81 
 Rembrandt, 163 
 Renan, M., 201 ; quoted, 202, 277, 
 
 285 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 121, 125 
 Richardson, Samuel, 51 
 Robinson, Mary, 376 
 Rogers, Samuel, 368 
 Romano, Giulio, 84 
 Rousard, poet , 345 ; quoted, 313-4 
 Rosa, Salvator, 281, 283 
 Rose, Mr., 358 
 Rose in Poetry, Pathos of the, 
 
 274 n., 345-64 
 Rossetti, D. G., 222, 297, 340, 368, 
 
 376-7, 386, 393, 413 
 Rossini, 101-2 
 Rousseau, J. J. 222, 230 
 Rubens, Peter Paul, 55, 143, 281, 
 
 283 
 
 Rufinus, poet, 352 
 Ruskin, John, 8, 126, 176, 230 
 
 SACKVH.LE, dramatist, 37 
 S. Lorenzo, Library of, 84 
 
 St. Paul, 20, 411 ; quoted, 18, 77, 
 410 ; interpretation of, 69 
 
 St. Peter's, Rome, 84 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, quoted, 119 
 
 Sallust, poet, 387 
 
 San Miniato, 142 
 
 Sand, George, 51, 230, 267 ; quoted, 
 228, 379 
 
 Sannazzaro, poet, 105, 195, 282 
 
 Sappho, poet, 149, 184, 348 
 
 Sarpi, 106 
 
 Saturday Review, 229 
 
 Scaliger, Joseph, 214-15 
 
 Schiller, poet, 153, 235, 238 
 
 Schopenhauer, 65, 205, 392 
 
 Schubert, 383 
 
 Science, in evolution, 9-11, 16 ; 
 and religion, 16, 20-26, 81, 405 ; 
 and immortality, 18 ; and art, 95 
 seq. 
 
 ' Scientific Movement in Literature,' 
 25 
 
 Scopas, sculptor, 42, 48 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 51, 221, 297, 
 334 n., 374-5, 382 
 
 Sculpture, 139, 142, 343 ; evolution 
 in, 41-3, 48 ; province of, 81 seq., 
 151 ; realism in, 111 seq. 
 
 Selden, 368 
 
 Seneca, 35, 39, 320, 370; quoted, 
 101-2 
 
 Sermoneta, Duke of, 198 
 
 Serpentine, 151 
 
 ' Service of Man,' 20 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 9, 27, 31, 
 34-7, 58, 153, 157-8, 204, 218- 
 19, 237, 255, 282, 308, 318-22, 
 327, 367-8, 371, 374, 381, 385-9, 
 413, 417 ; criticism of his works, 
 72-5; Walt Whitman on, 258, 
 267; quoted, 362, 391-2 
 
 Sharp, 377 
 
 Shelley, 289, 297, 313, 321-33, 344, 
 368, 371, 374 n., 376-8, 386-94, 
 413; quoted, 115, 140, 160-1, 
 225-6, 294-6, 381-3 ; on poetry, 
 315, 340 
 
 Shirley, dramatist, 36, 381 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 340, 368, 
 380; criticism of his works, 
 73-4 
 
 Siena, 46 
 
 Signorelli, painter, 46, 54, 80, 419
 
 430 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Silius Italicus, 273 
 
 Simplon Pass, poem on the, 292-4, 
 
 394 
 
 Skelton, 369 
 Smith, Alexander, 389 
 Smollett, 264 
 Socrates, 107, 227 
 Soglio, 300 
 ' Song of Eoland,' 62 
 Sophocles, 40-1, 56, 107, 123, 142, 
 
 219, 319-22, 343, 411; quoted, 
 
 177, 179, 410 
 South, Bishop, 232 
 Southampton, Lord, 75 
 Spectator, 26 n. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 7, 27; quoted, 
 
 290 
 Spenser, 320, 345, 360, 367-8, 
 
 380-1, 394-6; 'Faery Queen,' 
 
 75-6, 363, 370, 373 
 Spinoza, 286, 290 
 Statius, 273 
 Steele, 388 
 Sterne, 51, 219, 227 
 Stevenson, B. L., 230 
 Stirling, Earl of, 364 
 Straton, poet, 317 
 Strauss, 101 
 Strozzi, 106 
 Style, Notes on, 166-173 ; National, 
 
 174-216 ; Personal, 217-223 ; 
 
 Art of ,224-236 
 Swift, Dean, 163, 227, 235, 388; 
 
 on style, 168 
 Swinburne, 297, 328, 368, 374 n,, 
 
 376-8, 386, 390 
 Sydney, critic, 35 
 Symond's ' Wine, Women, and 
 
 Song,' 278 n. 
 
 TACITUS, 184, 187, 235, 387 
 
 Taine, M., 7 
 
 ' Tannhauser,' 101 
 
 Tasso, poet, 50, 57, 74-5, 235, 244, 
 
 320, 345, 358-64, 370-1, 389; 
 
 quoted, 158, 194, 359 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 211, 213, 374 n. ; 
 
 quoted, 212 
 Tennyson, Lord, 297, 313, 368, 
 
 374 n., 375-6, 382, 386,393, 395; 
 
 quoted, 118, 378, 386-7; on 
 
 Virgil, 272 
 
 Terence, 229 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 221, 374 
 Theism, notes on, 408-12 
 Theocritus, 57, 229, 264, 273, 364, 
 
 376 ; quoted, 351 
 Theodosius, Emperor, 186-7 
 Theology (see Beligion) 
 Thespis, 39, 41 
 
 Thomson, poet, 289, 376, 378, 391 
 Thoreau, quoted, 241 
 Thornycroft, Hamo, 268 
 Thucydides, 107, 180, 233, 235 
 Tiepolo, painter, 54 
 Tintern Abbey, 291, 331, 394 
 Tintoretto, 'painter, 139, 143, 146-7, 
 
 163, 282, 344 
 Tiraboschi, 8 
 Titian, painter, 112, 147, 149, 226, 
 
 280, 282, 344 
 Tolstoi, Count, 247, 267 
 Tourneur, Cyril, 36, 417 
 Turgeneff, 267 
 Turin, 108 
 
 Turner, painter, 284, 339 
 Tyndall, Prof., 26 n., 191 
 
 VAL, Bregaglia, 300 
 
 Valerius, Flaccus, 273 
 
 Valla, 71 
 
 Van Eyck, John, 112, 281, 282 n. 
 
 Vasari, Giorgio, 49, 116 n. 
 
 Velasquez, painter, 112, 149 
 
 Venice, 282 n. 
 
 Veronese, Paul, 226 
 
 Versailles, Palace of, 84 
 
 Victoria, Queen, 372 
 
 Victorian Poetry, 365-98 
 
 Vienna, 129 n., 130 n. 
 
 Virgil, 70, 86, 186, 230, 234-5, 
 
 264, 271-4, 280, 289, 319, 322, 
 
 338-9, 351, 370, 387, 413; 
 
 .ZEneid, 171, 375; quoted, 183, 
 
 287, 378 
 Volapuk, 242 
 Voltaire, 238, 317, 323 
 Von Banke, 235 
 Voysey, Bev. Mr., 408 
 Vulgate, the, 187-91, 210 
 
 WAGNEB, composer, 313 
 Walker, Frederick, 268
 
 INDEX 431 
 
 Waller, poet, 345, 364 Wordsworth, 164, 266,271, 289- 
 
 Watts, painter, 314 290, 297, 368, 371-2, 376-8, 
 
 Webster, poet, 36, 49, 368, 381 ; 382-3, 386, 393-4 ; quoted, 114, 
 
 quoted, 391 140, 225-6, 291-4, 325 34, 383 ; 
 
 Wells, poet, 389 Arnold on, 315, 322-7 
 
 West, painter, 121, 125 Wren, Sir Christopher, 167, 413 
 
 Whitman, Walt, quoted, 175, Wyatt, 395 
 
 333-4 ; and Democratic Art, 237- 
 
 268 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 75, n. XENOPHANES, quoted, 421 
 Wilkie, Sir David, 264 
 Wilson, dramatist, 36 
 
 Windsor, 282, n. ZOLA, Emile, 126, 416 ; ' La Terre,' 
 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 365 265 
 
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