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ESSAYS

SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE

“ESSAYS

SPECULATIVE AND SUGGESTIVE

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

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THIRD EDITION

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, & CO.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1907

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PRINTED BY

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_ ‘OF LONG DARK WINTER NIGHTS

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PREFACE

TO

THE THIRD 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

Viii 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
esthetic. 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 Ttaly,
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

——S— -

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:
eT have just been setting the finishing touches to my “ Essays
me peculative 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
4 _ 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 PREFACE

store on) are enough to provoke a saint: I go back to +
fourteenth century in Graubiinden when I am vexed ’—
referring to his preliminary studies in the medieval history
of the canton which he proposed to write. The revises 0
the Essays were passed ‘for press’ in March, and in Jun
the book appeared. On June 19 (‘1.30 at night’) he writes:
‘I have to-night received a copy of my Hssays.... 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 Tam rather glad it
goes forth to the world im forma pauperis... . Tt 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

iad te

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 ‘he Chere 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
if o 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 Hssays 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
Biot 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 Iam
allowed some years of energy, I may go on to new things with
j 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.
Tn 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)
vot the Munich school, well-known in Europe, and also in the
United States. He thinks that the Essays in this book upon the
Berinciples of art are original, sensible, and convincing enough
Bic 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 Obernetiter, of
Munich.’ The scheme, however, was never carried through.

xii 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 ©
Atheneum (last number) please rea@@ 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 Atheneum
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 Atheneum 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; Ruedi [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 go, I have love still, and
am yours.’ It is characteristic of Symonds that a month

PREFACE Xl

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

ee eT ee ee ee

t 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. BROWN.

Ca’ Torresella, Venice.
April 1907.

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AUTHOR’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

St ieee” i ae

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. [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 if 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 Purarz,
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

EME AES ORIG a eG ae
ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM Venn Pate Re oR ek
THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS Fas ha ee

ON THE RELATION OF ART TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 95
REALISM AND IDEALISM. . . . . . . . . 108
MEEODU rts ee ee AB
BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 137
“CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE . . 155
NOTES ON STYLE:

Part L—Huisrory AND USAGE OF THE WoRD . 2 ‘ . 166
Part IL—Nationat STYLE . : ; ; 3 : ; » 174
Part II].—Prrsonat STYLE . : ; ’ ; ; : . Si?
Part IV.—TuHer Art oF STYLE ; ; . : ; : . 224

“DEMOCRATIC ART, Wirn Sprctan REFERENCE To WaT Warr-

OS See. a a cr
ee) 0 eae ee ee 69
NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES . . . . . . 800

or MatrHew ARNOLD’s SELECTION FROM WORDSWORTH F » 815

Xviii CONTENTS

IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF ALL ART? | :
THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY

A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN WITH VICTORIAN
POETRY

APPENDIX :

Darwin’s THOUGHTS ABOUT GoD
THE Limits oF KNOWLEDGE
Notes on THEISM

THE CRITERION OF ART :
Note on ‘Reatism anp IDEALISM’ : , < : oe
Note on ‘THE Move’
PrRiokITyY oF THOUGHT TU Cieenien
CoLouR-SENSE AND LANGUAGE

INDEX

a ee

HSSAYS
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.—GorTHE
(circa 1770), translated by G. R. Lewes.

I

Ir 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

B

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

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 3

M 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 1548, 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
B2

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 thréugh the idealistic specula- —
tions of the last two centuries.

Itt

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. Religions, 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 Eyolu-

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,
Schénen, 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

_ 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 mzlieu, 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 noi all criticism proceeded upon —
this method? I would recommend those who ask these
questions to peruse Tiraboschi’s # Storia della Letteratura —
Ttaliana,’ 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. Ruskin’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

ih
4
a,
i

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. |

V

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 evilness (or cowardice) up-grown in me, none the less —
I shall surely follow.’ !

We cannot get beyond that: we need not seek to do so; —
for this prayer is compatible with every creed, and it contains —
the essence of absolute self-dedication. 4

By convincing us that the universe is one homogeneous |
whole, in which nothing can be lost and unaccounted for,
through which there 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 the 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

‘In another place Cleanthes declares that there is no higher

guerdon for gods or mortals than to sing the praises of the universal
Law—kowdy del vouov ev dlky duveiv.

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
a 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
globe, and that his mind is the highest expression of his
being.! 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
j. humanity in organic development. It is, therefore, by no
4 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 igrational 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 w and y of Algebra.

Vill

Having come into being, as I and. 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. Iam 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
eifted 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,

4)

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 hopegand 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—

>

ate.

‘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 7s 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.!. 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 cortége 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 21

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
_ yirtues 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 ofglife, such, for instance, as
parasites which prey upon our bodies in disease, have their
place in the scheme, the same raison d’étre, 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 ts 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 im 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 their 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.'
| 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.!

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;

Thouw’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.

' The translation of Goethe’s Proemiwm to Gott und Welt, 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.

l

ON THE APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY
PRINCIPLES TO ART AND LITERATURE

I

Ir 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 is 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.! While claiming venerable antiquity
and a widespread a priori acceptamce 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 4
human beings.

Evolution, in its largest sense, may be defined as ‘the ¥
passage of all things, inorganic and organic, by the action
of inevitable law, from simplicity to complexity, ffom an 7
undifferentiated to a differentiated condition of their common ~
stock of primary elements. We have -accepted the evofu- —
tionary theory for geology, or the history of the earth’s crust.
We have accepted it for biology, or iil 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.

a -
— ee

—

a

1 Life of Charles Darwin, vol. ii. pp. 180, 186.

q
t
a
5
|

: ij
EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 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
re 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 débris 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 artisti@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.!

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
4 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. Wedeal 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 EVOLUTIONARY 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 spies 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 33

— that the decadence has already arrived. This,
too, is inevitable and natural, because life is by no means
exhausted when maiurity 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.

Tit

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. Realistic 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

384 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

At this point the allegorical elements implicit in th
Medizval 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. yMinor 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 phos 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 35

Here we have to turn aside and notice the influences of
the new learning and the Italian Renaissance, 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
Roman comic poets, might be imposed upon our theatre,
But the shoot of the Romantic Drama, which had risen
spontaneously from the crumbling masses of the Medisyval
‘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
D2

36 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

progression discernible between the few examples of the earlier
Romantic 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 Romantic 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 Romantic 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 Romantic 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 Romantic 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 Ehizabethem theatre
could not have been continued.

tw Se

EVOLUTIONARY 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 ari 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

nese ee ee

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
Medieval England. Just when the energy of the Rhapsodes
had reached the point of exhaustion, lyrical dramatists began
‘to gather up the fragments from the rich Homeric table.’
This saying is attributed to Aischylus; 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
i 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 busking, 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 Roman 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. Aischylus, 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

7

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 Aischylus,
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 Aischylus, 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 Huripides 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 Aischylus, always implicit in Sophocles, survives
as a mere conventionality in Kuripides. 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 Cherémon 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 Cherémon (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
Kuripides left it, any more than Euripides could have
stayed at the same point as Sophocles, or than Sophocles
could have refrained from refining upon Aischylus, or than
Aischylus 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. Hach 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 Cherémon 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

a te ee Sa ae ee

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 Aiginetan 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 wsthetical 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 Erés, 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.

V

From Rome we can expect no enforcement of the principle
I am attempting to establish; for Roman 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 Greco-Roman 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 Roman statuary are those bas-reliefs on columns,
monumental effigies, and sepulchral portraits, in which the
archaic EKtruscan 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 Htruscan
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

d4 EVOLUTIONARY 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 Kuripides 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 Renaissance. 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 Kurope 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
ereatest 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

exotic, albeit they present distinctive attributes.

>
Vil

I cannot forbear from adducing yet another instance, which
seems 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 Romanesque 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 felé 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 efforis
culminated in the works of Fra Lippo Lippi, Perugino,
Mantegna, Fra Bartolommeo, Boiticelli, 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

ith ever-increasing impetus, so that the artistic type dis-
layed 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, Raphael,
fichel Angelo, Correggio, Giorgione, Andrea del Sarto,
k 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 wsthetic harmony is effected
for the apparently antagonistic elements which constituted
the basis of modern European culture. Beyond that point it
s hopeless to advance. The spheres of Christian belief
and of Greco-Roman mythology, as these were then under-
stood, had been ransacked; all salient subjects seized upon;
artistic problems within the limits of the type solved;
y 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
renesis 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
pe Becity. 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

‘reyitalise 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 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

on Kurope for well-nigh two centuries—until, indeed, fresh a
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 Romantic poetry, Medisval 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 Romantic
- 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
B

50 EVOLUTIONARY 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. Jt 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 Greco-Roman art is true of them. Ever since the

EVOLUTIONARY 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, Richardson, 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-
4 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 oneal
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 Hurope. 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.

ee ee ee ees
+ til 2 — 7

ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM

I

_ Ware 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

_ wsthetics, 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
esthetical 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 esthetical 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 encyclopedic and comparative collections of German
archseologists— explain and to some extent justify what looks
like caprice and chaos in esthetic 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 Verhdilinisse. 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

56 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM

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
eritic may become a wise man, a man of enlightened intelli-
gence, dpdvimos, 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 necéssary stages of birth,
erowth, 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.!

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 Kuripides 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
Mg 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
sesthetic 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 crafismanship on his attention are not so
paramount. Itis 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. Hach 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 sesthetic achievement, technical
dexterity, however skilfully applied, has never done anything
for a soulless artist. e

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 ag ~
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 ssthetic
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 ¢pdvipo, 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 seeckings 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.

it

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 xpirexde and criticus) 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 «pirat. 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 experis.

To this primary conception of criticism, a second has been
recently opposed. It is contended that the critic should
resign his pretensions to the judi¢ial 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

ena.

en E-

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. Romantic 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 esthetic 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 [on

sufficient demonstration.
In each of the three stages which I have indicated,

q 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 Roland’ 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 Roland,’ 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 itis 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
- gound criticism should bear in mind.! ‘ It behoves us,’ he

1 This fragment of Heraclitus is reported by Sextus Empiricus.
The Adyos évyds of the original, which is opposed to idia ppdynois, 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
Reliquia, p. 38, for the Greek text.

ee

a lds

a ee ee

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 propzdeutic. 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 (i8a dpdvyots) by what —
he can perceive of universal wisdom (xowy dpdvyois)—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.

V

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 Hthics 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.
Y: 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
F

A ee ee

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, i’ 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 sdéme 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 dedviwor or men of sober wisdom.

ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 67

How difficult his duty is, and how ill itis 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 race? 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, his 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 bythe 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.

Vil

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, f for his milieu. Thus the relation between A
and D, the artist and the critic, involves a blending of }, 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 Renaissance. 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 Musseus, 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 t
and Greco-Roman writers, Cicero and Plutarch, were accepted “4
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. h
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 —
preyailed. very 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 i
of unquestioning veneration.

Thanks to the profound enthusiasm awakened by the i
revival of learning in the fifteenth century, thanks also to —
the fact that humanism now began to form the staple of k
European culture, this stage of omnivorous acceptance and —
encyclopedic 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- s}
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 percenaa

SSE ES hee Faget > ae.

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

q 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.
I Thus criticism, as we understand it, emerged ; and one of
the main benefits derived from the Revival of Learning is the

3 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

4 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.
Tt 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 criticism 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. Hach 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.

Vill

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 unimportazt for his
purpose.

Tt 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 8. 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
Noble Kinsmen ; before we tried to eliminate what does not

ee

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.
| Kach rill of minute investigation swells the main current of
- criticism. Hach 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 feclings? 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 &

:

\

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 protegt 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

te ie oS ee en te |
= a

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,' 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
esthetic 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
‘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 ~

*
2
|

be acquainted with the history of our language in all its stages, —
and may be able to point out Spenser’s archeologisms, 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
nidification 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 medieval 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

Rightly 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

i 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 8. 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 ommne sczibile, 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.
Ii 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. 4 \
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 PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS

I

‘Arr,’ 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 ari 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 aris 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 esthetic 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 aris 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 medizval 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 esthetic 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

G

82 THE PROVINCES 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 crafisman’s skill, independent ;
of his theme ; but the mass of men will not be satisfied; and

THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 83

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.

Til

; 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. Hach
_ has its own department. Hach 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.

ee

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
a2

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84 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS

eae ow ree |

and colonnade, of cupola and facade 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 medisval 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 8. 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 PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS _~ 85

V

| 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
i 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,
Fs 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
a by attitude. If we dwell for an instant on the greatest his-
4 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 Rome, 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 palestra 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 Laocoén 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 —

Ee ee ~

THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 87

who are the several heroes of the Alginetan 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 Kurydice, 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.! 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 thé 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. Itis 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
musi¢. 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

VItl

Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and
consider two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any
system of esthetics. 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 thaw 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. Tor 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-

ee ion Ss

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 q

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.

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SES ee ee

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eae: =

ON THE RELATION OF ART TO SCIENCE AND
MORALITY

I

Tue 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 imneffieiency, 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,

Z

whether these be good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It isa

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 absitrac-
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,
esthetics.

In ethics, right conduct is good in itself, beautiful to the
imagination, true to our apprehension of permanent relations.
In esthetics, 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 rightness. 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
_Tuling 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 esthetical
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

IT

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, (8) 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 ulteriorends. 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,

TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 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.

Iit

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
4 the outer and the inner worlds to human sensibilities; she

5

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 elemenis,

it is vigorous, enduring, vital, universal, for all times 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 EKgeria 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 haye
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- —

oa ips

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
game 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

—————————— ee ,r—( te lO eee

yee re

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*TZannhduser 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
ficurative 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 SCTENCE AND MORALITY 103

climate holds good here. ‘Effeminat animos amcenitas nimia,
nec 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 arti—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 esthetic
vigour. On the contrary, the best work of that brilliant period
was accomplished during years which still retained the glow
of mediseval 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

j 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, rotien 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 iS
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, cireumambient, 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

— =.)

a a Ss

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
Tialian 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.

7
REALISM AND IDEALISM.

I

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 mauwvais 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-

eae =e Le Se eS

ee a ee

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 i in a process of development. Evolution shows that —
life is in continual progress; and progress from one point — ei
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 nvbiak 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, —
if 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.

It

He must indeed be a bold man who invites the world to
listen while he talks about Idealism and Realism. ‘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 ssthetic
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 Real 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 esthetic 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 REALISM 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 Raphael’s —
Leo or Velasquez’ Philip. q

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 Realism
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 118

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 Realism 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-

ee

"on al

REALISM AND IDEALISM 115

_ sented. If, on the other hand, he views things like the poet

in Shelley’s ‘ Prometheus Unbound,’! 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 aérial
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
conyventionalise 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 T 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.’ Conversely, a
slovenly and ignorant piece of technical workmanship may
have no imaginative qualities to recommend it.? 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. ven 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.

Til

We must not pause here in oursanalysis 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 angers
have evolved from studies of reality. Morever, artists, their

1 Such work was that of Gian Bellini in his Madonna at the Frari.
? Such work was that of Giorgio Vasari in his frescoes on the Cupola
of the Duomo at Florence.

=
q

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

—

es = ae |

reunite those excellences, to apply the principles of those q
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.
BovAerar pev add’ od dvvara, 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 esthetic sphere,
sin from the moral, pain and disease from the physical.

— ae, ee ee eee

in
As
a

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 ;
‘To escape from the mere frightful reality,’ says Joubert.
That is the function of the arts. Reality, however, is never
in a true sense, frighiful. Reality 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 thése 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,

;
‘
“
q
be
‘
§
:

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 Realism in
_ the intensest phase of veracity; it is truth quintessenced and
_ raised to the highest power. Such is the ultimate expansion
i 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. Tor 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 painstakifig 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
Realism. _
There is so much of a curious sort of pathos, combined —
with so much of passionate and sudden enthusiasm, in
Haydon’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 :

2. wae

‘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! IfI 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 ~

a ae

REALISM AND IDEALISM 128

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.’

V

At this point it is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to
a attempt the definition of Realism 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 Realism 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.

Realism 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 REALISM AND IDEALISM

‘ Polygnotus painted men better than they are, Pauson worse ee
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 fairér,’ }

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 Hclecties

passed for heroic, because they avoided literal painstaking —

1 These passages will be found in cap. xxvi. and cap. ii.

ne

REALISM AND IDEALISM 125

transcripts from reality. The doctrine of the beau ideal was
preached in France. Sir Joshua Reynolds 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;
i and through the starvation of her twin-sister Realism, art
fell into decay.
q 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.!

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, medisval, 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 esthetic 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 vérité 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.

eae

THE MODEL

I

I ATTEMPTED in the preceding essay to show that ficurative
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 Raphael’s figures.| 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, [ think, to acknowledge the superiority of the
more literal transcript from nature. Cunning 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.
livery 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

" Raphael’s drawing (in the Albertina collection, at Vienna, I believe)
is inscribed by Diirer: ‘1515. Raffahill di Urbin der so hoch beim Pabst
geacht ist gewest hat die hat diese nacken bild gemacht und hat sy dem
Albrecht 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.

K

130 THE MODEL

whole flesh surface exhibits vital energy ina way which no
work of art has ever done.

It will, however, be objected that to sociieaat 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.! (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 hag
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

' The Autotype Company sells an admirable carbon photograph |

Flandrin’s picture. The photograph of the model is from the seri
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 vrare vérité 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.

Il

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 Realist 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.

|

\
3
i

K 2

182 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 Pai 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

4 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 f
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 l'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, cannct 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 — 1
of the material supplied by nature, it follows that no two —
men can treat the same subject in the same way. Hach
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 r
interpretation, is therefore utterly impossible. What we call 5
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 h
of nature. Compare Raphael’s treatment of the female ol
in his small panel of the Three Graces (once in Lord |
Dudley’s, now in the Duc d’Aumale’s possession) with his
treatment of the female nude in the Farnesina frescoes, and

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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.

V

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 emoticn 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 réaliste accompli and
an idéaliste sowmis. 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.

Se ee
ae :

BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION,
CHARACTERISATION

I

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

a by a machine, and also that no two persons can produce

exactly similar transcripts from the same object.

he question, however, may be asked whether imitation

_4s 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
@ 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 es 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 beauty
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 tous. 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

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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-

EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 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 ws 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.

Tit

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 outlinés, suggesting in one stationary
attitude the inexhaustible capacities for action of the living
model. This, it may be one 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. Recumbent 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 9
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 148

i terflowing 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. I'ra 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. Rubens, 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
haying 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 ba
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 sti
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 collaborate:
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 ¢
good portrait. Or it may mean the expression of tk
thought and feeling, not inherent in the object, for which t
forms of art are vehicles. I shall deal at present only with
expression in the second of these senses. 4

I need not observe that much difference of opinion exists
as to whether artists ought to aim deliberately at expressix .
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.

7

EXPRESSION, 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

| al

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 Hernies, 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 Kcekermann, ~
while showing him a group of Christ with the Twelve

Apostles: ‘ These forms are but pocr subjects for sculpture. —

One apostle is always much like another, and very few have
enough life and action connected with them to give them

‘
A

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 8. Catherine of Alexandria a broken
wheel, 8. Sebastian an arrow, 8. Agnes a lamb, 8. 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
Raphael’s School of Athens, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion at San _

Rocco, 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”

EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 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 ina 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 Laocoén, 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 Laocoén, 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,

L 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 vesice
—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.

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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—tTitian’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 esthetic 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.’

150 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 dees. 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 thee !

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.

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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 asin avision. 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 4
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: ‘ Rien n’est si joli que la
fable, si triste que la vérité.’
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 esthetic 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,

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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 Klysium, 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 efiected 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 Phedrus. Wemay 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 §. 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 puis
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.

a

CARICATURE, THE FANTASTIO,
THE GROTESQUE

I

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

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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.

IT

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

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THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 157

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,
Danite’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
chimera of Hellenic sculpture, the horned and hoofed devil
of medisval 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 Rab, 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 é 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 en of fact for
human minds.

Tit

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 naiveté and lack of technical skill. On
the contrary, Lombard sculpture, as we study this on the
facades of North Italian churches, and medieval Teutonic
art in general, as we study this upon the pages of illustrated

Re ere ae ee ae

THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 159

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 Robin 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 [ 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 pcssessed 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 artwork 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
esthetic 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

THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 161

gensual 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 Hlizabethan age
were naive, where we have become self-conscious. Thus
Shelley’s crimen les@ majestatis varies with the age and the
conditions of civility in which men live. Much that ig
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 withthe 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

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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

!

THE FANTASTIC, THE GROTESQUE 168

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,

Vv

These considerations lead us finally to inquire in what
sphere of human sensibility the arts legitimately move.

It is usual to distinguish between esthetic and non-
esthetic 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
ssthetic 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-esthetic 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 swsthetic, because they bring our carnal functions into play,
and only indirectly agitate the complex of our nature. The
more abstract modes of thought are Rot esthetic, 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

Wart I
HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD

I

z
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 pene Attico stilo scripte, 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

« wb -* Sy Wleeus Oe sue So El the ESS ee ee

HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 167

this term naturally. But as no one now used a stilws 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 paris.
| 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.
| Hivery 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

i

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.

III ‘ |

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

HISTORY AND USAGE OF THE WORD 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 ‘Aineid,’ 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
esthetically: 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-

HISTORY 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-
yersation 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.

art IH
NATIONAL STYLE

I

LanauacGe 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

—_—

ie aoe

NATIONAL STYLE 175

e 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. Races 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
irdoracie 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 i
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, amd 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, évea wrepdevra, ‘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 177

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.

& TipBos, & vuppetov, @ karackadys
otknots &elppoupos, of mopevouat

mpds Tos euavTis av apiOudy éy vexpois
mAciorov SéSenta eprépacca dAwAdTwr’
dv AooOia ye Kal Kdciora 5) pakpoe
Karey, mply wot wotpay é&qKew Blov.

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 :

Tt Sra Sdéns, 2 Th KANSévos KaAjs
padrnv peovons apeAnua ylyverat,
ei Tas y "A@hvas pact deoreBeordras
elvat, udvas 5¢ Thy Kakotmevoy Eévov

od ew olas Te Kat udvas apKeiy Exew ;
K&movye Tov Tar’ éotly, olrives BdOpwv

éx T@vdE w’ eEdpayTes clr’ édAatbvere,
dvoua pdvov Selcayres ; ob yap 3h Td ye
om’ ovdé ripya Thy emel rd y’ Epya pou
memov0dt’ €or paaddov } Sedpaxdra,

N

178 NOTES ON STYLE

el vo. TX ntpds Kal marpds xpeln Adve,

dy otver’ éxpoBe? we. TovT’ yw Kadr@s

etouda.
Had we known nothing of Gidipus 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 Aischylus. Pindar builds with blocks of
words in the manner of Cyclopean masonry. ~

Tas d& Ocotévov axrivas mpoowmov papwapiColoas Spaxels
ds wh wd0wm Kumalverat, €E Gdduayros

}) oddpov KexdAnevTat wéeAaiway Kapdlay

Wuxpa paoyl.

Carrying on this figure of architectural structure, we might

at i Sea ee

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 Adschylus assumes a different form.
Aristophanes described that manner in a passage of the
‘ Frogs,’ which shows that Attic taste regarded it already as
archaic:

Zora 8 immoAdpwv re Adywv Kopvbatoaa velkn,
oxwiarduwy Te wapatdvia, omiAevmaTa T° Epywr,
pwrds &uvvomevov ppevoréxrovos avdpbds

phual immoBdpova,

ppltas & abroxduov Aogpias Aaciadxeva xalray,
Sewdy emioxdviov tvvdywv Bpvx@mevos hoet
phuara youporayn, muvakndoy &moomay.

ynyeve puohpatt,

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
Aischylean style, when the = gives a free rein to the
impulse of his ‘ mighty line’

| & a:

Suwal yuvaikes, alde Topydvwv Sixny

paoxlrwves kal memAckTaynuevat

mukvots Spdkovew.

, Of such sort are the ponderous iambics, struggling beneath

I their Marathonian panoply :

; GAA? oF KapavioTipes dp0arudpuxor,
_ Aischylus proves that Greek could be voluminous as well as
_yoluble. But in his hands the style was not always pushed

q to the extreme of emphasis and exaggeration. Tragic

solemnity of diction reaches the height of massive yet

elastic energy in Cassandra’s prophetic specches 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 Adschylus. 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 Tl wot Zevds Hv 6 xnptias rdde

ovd’ % tdvoikos Tay KdTw Oecd Alen >

ovdé cbévew TocotToy @duny Ta oo

Knpvyual’ Gor’ &ypamrra Kaopary Oeav

vouiua Stvacba Ovnrdv dvd’ smepdpapeiv.

ov ydp Ti viv ye KaxX0Es, GAA’ Gel wore

GH Tadra, Kovdels oldev ef Brov ’havn.

N 2

180 NOTES ON STYLE

it is upon passages like these that Euripides Sewtns to have

ae ae

ae em

formed his style; that limpid and lucid flow ef words, which —

is so sweet and musical, so plastic and so melancholy :

tls 8° oldev, ei Cv rovd’, 8 KéxAnTra Oaveiv,
+d Civ 5& OvnoKew orl: Any buws Bporay
‘yooovot of BAéwovtes, of 8 6AwAdTES
‘ovdév vorovoty, ovdé KéKTHYTAL KaKd.

The Greeks, especially the Attic Greeks, were a nation of
talkers and public speakers. In the Lesché, the Agora, the
‘Paleestra, the Pnyx, the Dikasterion, they carried on their
intellectual life. Afterwards, they met again for discussiom
‘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. e 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 Greculus esuriens. Tiven the golden periods of Plato
suffer from loquacity, a twittering reiteration of yap and yody

and peév and dé, 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 .‘ Republic,’ the

‘Symposium,’ and the ‘ Phedrus.’ ‘As specimens of a pecu- i
liar kind of literary art, they are unassailable, preserving ~
with peculiar felicity the very form and pressure of the times. —

re

NATIONAL STYLE 181

“they represent. Still, they reveal an element of weakness in
‘ithe 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: érea wrepdevra. 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.

ITI

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

. e,* ° . . H
primitive exuberance. Latin has no dual, no aorist, no middle —
voice, no verbs in ps. 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. Tt 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 superfiuities 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 ile bonis flebilis occidit. . . .
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

=e ee

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.

5
1

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

en ee a i Oe

Se ae

NATIONAL STYLE 183

blocks; but Latin could do more. There is 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,
Kt 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 svum.

The Roman 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, except Sappho, prfinoed stanzas of the same —
stationary and yet moving dignity as these: |

.

Atqui sciebat que sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen

Dimovit obstantes propinquos

Et populum reditus morantem,

Quam si clientum longa negotia,
Dijudicata lite, relinqueret,

Tendens Venafranos in agros

Aut Lacedemonium 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 esthetic 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 vulius ;
Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ;
He 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 deyelop-
ment of the language under these altered conditions.

The date 895 a.p. 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, Cmsar 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 Cesar, 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 Hast, of Roman 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 medieval. ‘Quantum flevi in hymnis et
canticis ecclesis tus!’ 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 he.
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 ike
Ausonius, a fresh and varied style appeared, adapted in its
elasticity and ‘plangent music to the utterance of modert n
emotion. And while the instrument of prose was being
reconstructed thus, metre discarded quantity for acce ani
invented new rhythms and new stanzas, adopted the orna-
ment of rhyme. y
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 ce
extracts :

Post hee aperuit Job os suum, et maledixit diei suo, et locutus est. —
Pereat dies in qua natus sum, ef nox in qua dictum est: conceptus
est homo. ‘
Dies ille vertatur in tenebras, non requirat eum Deus desuper, et no?
illustretur lumine. 4
Obscurent eum tenebre et umbra mortis, occupet eum caligo, et
involvatur amaritudine.
Noctem illam tenebrosus turbo possideat, non computetur in diebus iS
anni, nec numeretur in mensibus.
Sit nox illa solitaria, nec laude digna:
maledicant ei qui maledicunt diei, qui parati sunt suscitare leviathan
Obtenebrentur stelle caligine ejus: expectet lucem et non videat, n
ortum surgentis aurorss ; as
Quia non conclusit ostia ventris qui portavit me, non abstulit mala —
ab oculis meis. iy
Quare non in vulva mortuus sum, egressus ex utero non statim
perii ?
Quare exceptus genibus? Cur lactatus uberibus ?
Nunc enim dormiens silerem, et somno meo requiescerem :

4
"y

NATIONAL STYLE 189

Gum regibus et consulibus terre, qui edificant sibi solitudines ;

Aut cum principibus, qui possident aurum et replent domos suas
argento :

Aut sicut abortivum absconditum non subsisterem, vel qui concepti
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 medieval 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 pulchre sunt mamme tum 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
yestimentorum tuorum sicut odor thuris.

Hortus conclusus soror mea sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus.

Emissiones tus paradisus malorum punicorum cum pomorum
fructibus. Cypri cum nardo;

Nardus et crocus, fistula et cinnamonum cum universis lignis Libani,
myrrha et aloé cum omnibus primis unguentis.

Fons hortorum: puteus aquarum viventium, que fluunt impetu de

Libano.

Surge aquilo, et veni auster, perfla hortum 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 suavis, aut vis
saquee decurrentis nimium,

190 NOTES ON STYLE

Aut sonus validus precipitatarum petrarum, aut ludentium animalium
cursus invisus, aut mugientium valida bestiarum vox, aut resonans de
altissimis montibus echo: deficientes faciebant illos pre timore. ;

Omnis enim orbis terrarum limpido illuminabatur lumine, et non
impeditus operibus continebatur.

Solis autem illis superposita erat gravis nox, imago tenebrarum, que
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 tunc deesse ;

In tremenda mortis hora

Veni Jesu absque mora ;
Tuere me et libera.

Cum me jubes emigrare,

Jesu care tunc appare ;

O amator amplectende,

Temet ipsum tune ostende
In cruce salutifera.

We have travelled far away from Regulus. 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 vulgarisatewr has done
@ millionth part of what 8. 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
Rome 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, 8. 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 Roman 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 ; nec mihi jam dicere poterant:
ecce veniet, sicut cum viveret, quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse
mihi magna questio, et interrogabam animam meam quare tristis esset,
et quare conturbaret me valde ; et nihil noverat respondere mihi. Hi si
dicebam : spera in Deum, juste non obtemperabat; quia verior erat et
melior homo, quem carissimum amiserat, quam phantasma, in quod
sperare jubebatur. Solus fletus erat dulcis mihi, et successerat amico
meo in deliciis animi mei.—Et nunc, Domine, jam illa 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 queritis eam. Qusrite quod queritis; sed ibi
non est, ubi queritis. Beatam vitam queritis 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 Revival
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 scaturientes lachrymis Confessionum libri—pages running
over with the fount of tears. When he climbed the Mont
Ventoux with his brother Gherardo in 1386, 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 medieval 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

V

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 perdé 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
highesi 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

ee ee ee oe ee ee ee ee

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-
geval Tuscany. The Revival 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 Lialian 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.

Pit volte io mi maraviglio meco medesimo come, ponghiamo caso,
Virgilio, esempio supremo di perfezione agli scrittori, sia venuto e man-

02

196 NOTES ON STYLE

tengasi in questa sommita di gloria. Perocché, 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 pit 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 |’ 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;

pn ee ee

NATIONAL STYLE 197

Sovente in queste piagge,

Che, desolate, a bruno

Veste il flotto indurato, 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

Il 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 |’ uomo é nulla,

Sconosciuto é del tutto: e quando miro
Quegli ancor pit senz’ alcun fin remoti
Nodi quasi di stelle,

Ch’ a noi paion qual nebbia, a cui non |’ uomo
E non la terra sol, ma tutte in uno,

Del numero infinite e della mole,

Cor |’ aureo sole insiem, le nostre stelle

O sono ignote, 0 cosi paion come

Kssi alla 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 panijicio,
birrificio, cotionificio, and by newspaper jargon, of which the
following sentence from a police-court report is only a fair
specimen :

Tosto avvenuto |’ attentato la cameriera si é resa latitante e finora

non si poté mettersi sulle tracce. L’ ufficiale ieri stava molto male,
tanto che vociferavasi fosse resa necessaria |’ 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. ‘ Hverything 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 étre, le verbe fazre, les
conjonctions encombrantes; toute cette pouillerie de notre
prose francaise,’ 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 comtext, 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’étre 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.

‘Cet art de la Prose francaise,’ exclaims Paul Bourget,
in a passage from which I have already quoted, ‘héritage
magnifique de la grande civilisation romaine. Le jour ot
cet art disparaitrait, la conscience francaise serait bien malade,
car dans l’ordre de l’intelligence elle aurait perdu sa plus
indiscutable suprématie, Les langues se parlent sur toute

NATIONAL STYLE 201

la surface du monde; il est probable qu’il ne s’écrit qu’une
_ seule prose, si l’on prend le mot dans le sens lapidaire et
définitif ot pouvait l’entendre un Tite-Live ou un Salluste;
cette prose, c’est la ndtre. Inférieurs dans la poésie aux
subtils et divins poctes Anglais, initiés 4 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 Kcrite.’

There 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. Renan’s translation of the Book of Job
and the already quoted Latin of the Vulgate :

: Que ne suis-je mort dés le sein de ma mére,
| | Au sortir de ses entrailles, que n’expirai-je!

Pourquoi deux genoux sont-ils venus me recevoir,
Et deux seins m’inviter 4 les sucer?

Maintenant je serais couché, je me reposerais,
Je dormirais dans une paix profonde,

Avec les rois et les grands de la terre,
Qui se bitissent des mausolées,

Avec les princes qui possédent V’or,
Et remplissent leur maison d’argent ;

Ou bien, comme I’avorton caché, je n’existerais pas,
Comme les enfans qui n’ont pas vu la lumiére.

La les méchants cessent leurs violences,
La se repose l’homme épuisé.

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 allégresse pour
Israél,’ in the French version of the Psalms, contrasts but
poorly with our own, ‘Then shall,Jacob rejoice, and Israel —
shall be glad.’

Vil

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 schwerfdllig—
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

rf Es bleibt uns deshalb nichts iibrig als den Begriff der Kunst so zu
. sagen lemmatisch aufzunehmen, was bei allen besonderen philosophi-
'_ schen Wissenschaften, wenn sie vereinzelt betrachtet werden sollen, der
Fall ist. Denn erst die gesammte Philosophie ist die Erkenntniss des
Universums als in sich eine organische Totalitit, 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 zuriickkehrender Kreis, als er anderer Seits zugleich
einen nothwendigen Zusammenhang mit anderen Gebieten hat, ein
Riickwirts, aus dem er sich herleitet, wie ein Vorwirts, zu dem er selbst
in sich sich weiter treibt, insofern er fruchtbar 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 cepuvdrys, 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 Verhdltmss, Bestimmung ; instead of con-—
cept, Begriff. Some of their philosophical expressions, such
for instance as Welianschawung, display an inimitable apti-
tude. Even the terms of physical science are not remote
from common life. Schwefel-sdwré'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.!

' I ran through two numbers of a local German newspaper the other
day, and noted the following barbarisms: Konstatiren, konveniren,
passiren, prosperiren, kompromettiren, blamiren, primiren, projektiren,
reformiren, publiziren, korrigiren, patronisen, kulmirinen, kursiren, prasi-
diren, Debatte, Diskussion, Direktion, Hotelier, Instruktor, Referat, Kon- —
kurrenz, Aktionir, 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 Wiarterin wirkten die
Suggestions 4 échéance so michtig, dass sie mir erklirte, sie sei absolut
iiberwiltigt und wire gezwungen, sogar einen Mord zu begehen, wenn
ich ihr denselben suggeriren wiirde, so furchibar sei der Trieb, auch den
gréssten Unsinn zu begehen.

It may be conceded that in an essay on Hypnotism, the
French phrase Suggestions ad échéance is appropriate by
reason of its technical significance. Still we ask where is
the necessity for intelligent, swggestible, 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, seriés, Stationen, Accord, Tapet, Billet,
splendid, Details, Honneurs. Some phrases were peculiarly offensive, as
these: Diese auffallige Coincidencz, diese theatercoup miassige Insceni-
rung; Emission der Aktien ; hindurchpilotirtes Projekt ; Kompetentester ;
plausibeln Rentabilitétsberechnungen. 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 Miarchen 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. © .

VIIl

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 obtainedll
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 Knglish 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,’ saidthe 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 doas 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

b

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. 4

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.

es

<P
ms vt

et

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.

P2

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 Apogeeum, 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
ares 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.

Oe

= ow

ti

Ee ka tg ne eS Te

er kee

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 Klizabethan 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.}

' Pattison’s Essays, vol. i. p. 91.

914 -- ' 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 -_ fiery Turk which he had
bought at the Frankfort fair had once liked to have proved fatal to
him.! .

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 : ?

We arenot 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 : 8

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.

' Pattison’s Essays, vol. i. p. 98. 2 Thid. p. 110.

3 Ibid. p. 139.

NATIONAL STYLE 215

The following sentence might be proposed as a puzzle to
school-boys. Hixamine 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 Cesar 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 Scealiger, 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 Rector of Lincoln
College, is capable of ignoring the graces of form, and
violating the rules of language. Mr. Pattison pours contempt
on French schén-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.’’* 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 schién-geisterei and less of scientific
pedantry.

1 Pattison’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. Weare intolerant
of rules, and jealous lest so-called ‘@orrection’ 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 WEL
PERSONAL STYLE

I

A survey 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
Gradle, 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 NOTES ON STYLE

pena

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 ome 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.! 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 é

by the hackneyed epigram : ‘ Le style c’est l’homme.’

* See Emile Hennequin, La Critique Scientifique, pp. 64-67, for

a full and luminous exposition of these poinis.

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 todo. 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. Aischylus 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.

220 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 zsthetical qualities. They
are felt inevitable in style. The sedentary student does 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 aspecis 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 and 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,

Nog MEO ea

ee Oe a ee, ee

a

ra . ‘
ee

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.

IIT

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
Tike 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 sacrifica 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.!

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! 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 his 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 Boswell, 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 Doré; nor would it surprise us to
discover that Gustave Doré 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

ens ha _

se 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.

*
Wart LT
THE ART OF STYLE

i

‘Tur choice and command of language,’ said Gibbon, ‘is
the fruit of exercise.’ Every writer has it in his power 0
improve his faculty of expression, as every athlete can improve
his muscular development by practice. , q

The final end of all style is precision, veracity of utterance,
truth to the thing to be presented. The thing itself will

and in emotional richness, in imaginative grandeur and in
passionate intensity. Style, regarded from the point o:
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 o}
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; 4
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 !

cr: —
Se er ee

ae ae

sy

THE ART 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 fiflé 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
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,
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 Pheedrus on the banks of the Ilissus. This is
_ what Buffon meant by the words which so impressed Gustave
Flaubert: ‘Toutes les beautés intellectuelles qui se trouvent
_ dans un beau style, tous les rapports dont il est composé, sont
autant de vérités aussi utiles, et peut-étre plus précieuses pour

_ Yesprit public, que celles qui peuvent faire le fond du sujet.’

<
.
&
.,
t

i

IT

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
Q2

228 NOTES ON STYLE

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 eyil
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 dren, 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 : 1

Ever since a more bookish air was impressed upon composition —
without much effort by the Latinised and artificial phraseology, by

of not thinking overmuch about writing. A fastidious avoid-
.
,
.
§

. &
ie

ic
a

re

THE ART 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.

Kvery 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. Wehave 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. Ruskin his on the Bible and Hooker, Mr.
R. Li. 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 Kuphuism, 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.

RO OE «Fe

wih ee su >

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.'

ry.

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 @re 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 §. 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 qualities 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 ON 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

i] THE ART OF STYLE 285

*

_ speculative questions which have been already discussed in a
_ former essay.’

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 Roland, 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 Archilochus and Aristophanes, Juvenal and Persius,

Rabelais and Regnier, 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,
Yon Ranke 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.

cas Bin fm yiure
He

236 NOTES ON STYLE

| study under which we work now, force the artiat to reflec
upon the various creations of numerous predecessors in an
field which he has undertaken. And thus the great monu
ments of past ages are continually moulding and impressing
the style of the present, aera (hes recrossing, blending
their influences. Ever more an
Occidental races tends to become a complicated. mass ot
hybrids. | il

ore, the literature of the

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ee SEE Se Sts. SR ee sa

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DEMOCRATIC ART

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WALT WHITMAN

I

Dunine 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 medieval 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 Rolla, Byron’s —
Manfred, Heine’s Ratcliffe, Schiller’s Robbers. Sense and —
stateliness, the precepts of Boileau, Voltaire’s pellucid irony, —

Pope’s correction, Lessing’s moderation, were assailed with
p gs m

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 pagduced & 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 on

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 Final; 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 tne earlier grasp upon them,
without fervour of conviction, and without power to awake
popular enthusiasm.

Til

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 anew 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, —

a et

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. Weare the complex outcome of a tenfold

R

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 theifmoorings, 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
Volapik.!.

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 3
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 humanrace—“ the samesubjectcontinued,” —
as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If wearenot _
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 Sayin light. Wishing to do him justice, I havell

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 Iam unacquainted. At ©
any rate, the essay ought to be read by students of Whitman, for it is ]
full of fine things. :

:

ih

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 Greco-Roman 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

R 2

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 presens 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 enipliisie 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 245

: : 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 medieval 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 Regent, 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 ©

|

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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 f 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.

V

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 =N-masse.’ What this word means for Whitman is
expressed at large throughout his writings. We might throw
light upon it from the following passage : !

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.

ee

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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: !

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 : ?

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.

! ¢ Starting from Paumanok,’ 14. 2 ‘Walt Whitman, 33.
3 * Miracles.’ 4 Walt Whitman, 154.

250 DEMOCRATIC ART

The heroic lies bie our reach, if we but sireteh: “a rpc
forth to touch it:

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 we 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 : ?

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 : *

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. 7

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 Tbid. 31.
3 * Leaves of Grass,’ 4. 4 «JT sing the Body Electric,’ 2.

DEMOCRATIC ART 261

‘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: !

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-boy—riding behind
him at the drape of the ues

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four Gostun’ 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; zbid. 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 ina passage which sounds
paradoxical, but the Sarria kana e icici is calculated to
arouse intelligence :

Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three saicaed sngels with
shirts bagged out at their waists ;

The snag-toothed hostler, with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come,

Selling all he possesses, travelling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother,
and sit by him while he is tried for eaey-

The resplendent manhood of Michael, Gabriel, Rahal
‘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,’

' 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 ere tee this unmasking
and unbaring of appearances, this recognition of divinity in
all things, is the secret of Democratic Art. Itis 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, Medieval, 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 mediwval Europe ; or intel-
lectual, as in Renaissance 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

254 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 4 Péking ceindra ma république.

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 stupéfaits
Ne verront qu’une mer de choux et de navets.

DEMOCRATIC ART 255

Le monde sera propre et net comme une écuelle ;
L’humanitairerie en fera sa gamelle, —

Ht le globe rasé, 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, Adschylus; 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.' 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.’

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

t These, and all other italics, are mine; intended to direct attention
to the main points, as I conceive them, in my quotations from Whitman.
2 This and the following extracts are taken from ‘ Democratic Vistas.’

we

DEMOCRATIC ART 257

after another, and for ever occupied in dyspeptic amours with
dyspeptic women.’ !

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 power, 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,

8

258 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 aclass 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.’ .
4

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,
if remains to fix attention firmly on the permanent and
indestructible significance of arts and letters :

The literature, songs, esthetics, etc., of a country are of «mportance
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- j
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.

ee oh a

a a

Vil

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 :

~ ae
pga. 15 Fe,

HES ig ee

pe i ty ta

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
_—pbut 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 medisval 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 Roman 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 dtself,’
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 t

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.

~
=

DEMOCRATIC ART 363

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.

xX

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

en ey es

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 the people.

Hogarth and the painters of his kind, who have addicted
themselves to satire, need not detain us long. In ‘The Idle
Apprentice,’ as in ‘ Marriage 4 la Mode,’ Hogarth 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 prosaic 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 an ©
aristocratic age, he preaches to the people, or ostentatiously —
takes lessons from them, or shows obtrusively that he is
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. lis —
true greatness consists in a burning national enthusiasm; but
the nation is still regarded as a hierarchy of well-defined

DEMOCRATIC ART 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.
Hach 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 Frére Yves,’ Rudyard
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,
sc 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

I

A votumEe 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 Gita. 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 Latmos.

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 Cherémon 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 —

ay ht

LANDSCAPE 271

| ephemeral bloom like Herrick, or apply them to his own

4 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 mythopoic 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. t

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. _ .

Se en ee ge ee

~~

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 Greco-Roman archi-
tecture. The treatise of Philostratus called cixdves possesses
considerable interest, as determining the character of these
pictures. It is clear that though figure-subjects of the seulp-
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 «esthetic impression made by natural objects on the human
sensibilities.

The Roman 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.' 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? Iam sure you
have, and that you have kept it in remembrance. At Treves,
for instance, in the dining-room of Afolus, 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. ry
‘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 mysti
rites, and each bore emblems of her doom according as shi

1 ¢The Pathos of the Rose in Poetry.’

LANDSCAPE 275

died on earth.! 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 Cibalus, 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:

Aéris in campis, memorat quos Musa Maronis,

. Myrteus amentes ubi lucus opacat amantes,
Orgia ducebant heroides et sua queeque,
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 Gibalides Hyacinthus,
Et Crocus auricomans et murice pictus Adonis,
Et tragico scriptus gemitu Salaminius Aias.
Omnia que lacrimis et amoribus anxia mestis
Exercent memores obita jam morte dolores,
Rursus in amissum revocant heroidas svum.

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 Roman 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 monastie
intellect whimsically subjected them to a system of allegorical —
interpretation. y
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 ssthetical 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. Architect

LANDSCAPE 277
i

_ 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 Eddic
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 Greco-Roman culture. Such as it was, the dominant
civilising energy, that of the Latin Church, laid it under a
strict interdict.

Renan 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 medieval
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. 3

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 Renaissance, —
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.’ —
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. y

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 Provencal
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 : !

Dolee 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
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
Dell’ ultima dolcezza che la sazia.

A guisa di leon quando si posa.

Noi andavam per lo vespéfo attenti |
Oltre, quanto potean gli oechi 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 Romans 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 wsthetical 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 1 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.!

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 medieval 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, §. 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 naiveté. It would be peevish to demand more con-
centrated poetry in the delineation of blue crags and sun-

1 Rubens, 1577-1640. N. Poussin, 1594-1665. Claude, 1600-1682.
G. Poussin, 1613-1675. 8S. Rosa, 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 goldjand 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.!

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 isin 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
8. 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. Rocco 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. Rocco. 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 288

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 8. 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 Iam 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 seventeénth 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. Rarely, 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. q

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 |

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 ;

substantial acquisitions of exact knowledge in chemistry andi

tidy
4

LANDSCAPE 285

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. |

Il

The great creation of the Middle Ages, according to
M. Renan, 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 chimere bombycinantes —
im vacuo, monsters of the fancy spifning 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

medieval Christian mythology. The principal of these

may be enumerated: first, criticism applied to documents

and historical testimony ; second, the politico-religious move-—

=e a

LANDSCAPE 287

ment of the Reformation; 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 IT 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 medieval 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 Rome, 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 wsthetic 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 posts 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 medieval theology.

IV

Of Goethe’s pantheism no better example can be found
than the Proémium to ‘Gott und Welt.’ This poem has been
already quoted in a previous essay;! 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
nsuous, for the beauty of the world became in manhood

deep mystic insight, piercing behind the veil of nature to
u 2

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 ocea
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 behole¢
from this green earth,’ into his confidence, feeling that the
are kindred to himself. In nature, as in the mind of man
there dwells one spirit, from whom we gather strength, an¢
who sustains our aspiration. This is the meaning of the
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 sé
how Wordsworth’s mysticism gave tone to his descriptior
of landscape. I will select the poem on the Simplon Pas
than which nothing nobler in blank verse has been writte
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,

a

LANDSCAPE 293

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 Hternity,

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 presens 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,
Actwon-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, ir

LANDSCAPE 295

aati

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 :!

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! 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

1 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
aérial 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 demon of the whirlwind, the chariot-races of the hours,

the primeval genii of Prometheus Unbound—all these —

creations of the poet’s mythopeic 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 jdos 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 297

V

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, Rossetti, Swinburne, Arnold, Roden 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 Roden Noel does the cult of nature rise to the
feryour-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,
Roden 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 medieval Christendom. These two arts drew
abundant ideality from these two spheres of thought. But
when a new religious sense arose in Kurope—when theistic
conceptions, especially among the northern races, lost that
sensuous concreteness which is adapted to #sthetical 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

I

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.

Tn 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 fabrie
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.!

Blake’s sentences, pregnant with mysticism, struck a deep
chord and chimed with thoughts which were already stirring
inme. For awhile, 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.

! See above, p. 193.

302 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES

IT

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. Ait 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 toinorganic —
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. :

Til

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 Kast, 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.

a eee 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 eack
stage, while in that stage, cannot overleap the barriers of thei
defined personality, cannot mingle freely by sympathy anc

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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 qud 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
x

a

306 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES

(ita, 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 efests. 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.

V

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 markeé
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 havir
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 a
when it expresses our sense of affinity with nature in th
forms of myth. When this step has been taken, the personag
brought into ideal being cannot be merely wise, or merel
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 ALLEGORTES

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? 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. W
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 whom 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 medieval 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 ovr 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 ¢Ollective 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

ae

NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 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 spectts 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 sprafig 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. rudition 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.

Hxamining 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

- go 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
Tannhiuser, 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 ‘ Rhaicos,’
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.

Vill

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
Lempriére, and when the artistic handling of allegorical —
themes proceeded upon imitation of Greco-Roman 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 POETRY AT BOTTOM A CRITICISM
OF LIFE?

A REVIEW OF MATTHEW ARNOLD’S SELECTION ©
FROM WORDSWORTH:!

Ir 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, afte
mature reflection on the nature of poetry, will not agree. That
the weight. of Mr. Arnold’s authority should be unhesitatingl)
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 Oma
Khayyam failed of true greatness because he was a reactionary,
and that Théophile Gautier took up his abode in what cam
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

5 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. Kven 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 i8 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 Wwes 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, i
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,

ee

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, A’schylus,
Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Moliére —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 comi- —
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 4
encouraging that false view of poetry which led the Byzantines s
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 t
beauty as ‘Die sinnliche Erscheinung der Idee.’ Poetry is P
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 i
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 i"
about life, but he whose work most fully and faithfully reflects _

life in its breadth and largeness, eliminating what is accidental, 4
trivial, temporary, local, or transmuting simple motives into i :

symbols of the universal by his treatment. He teaches less —

ee

A CRITICISM OF LIFE? 321

iy by what he inculcates than by what he shows ; and the truth
a 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 Cressida, 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. 7

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

Y

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 @ll these qualities, together
with that sound humanity which confers upon them immortal
freshness. Of Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, Aischylus, Dante,
Virgil, Shakespeare, Moliére, 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 i
greatest modern poet since the death of Moliére 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-—

ara Oh edi, @ dt

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
Jargeness. 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
! x2

324 _ IS POETRY AT BOTTOM

philosophical experiments—the ‘Prelude,’ the ‘ Excursion’

ool uit ae “er et ae

—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

i Pe Ne on

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 Wordsworthians 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.

\

| 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.

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 !—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 :

ws

;

But sae 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 of 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 ~

Still if, after study of the greatest literatures of Hurope, .

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 poet,

_ 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, a8 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 as 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 laya 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 few 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. }

L 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
fobe lived in. But familiarity convinces us that it is good and
wholesome to abide init. 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,

Se eee

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 enforcemen
by precepts that remind us of the preacher. This leads to ¢
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 vi
life interrupted by a stanza of admonition like the following:

S
oe

O Reader! had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O 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’
sesthetically, 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,

“J
a
Sor
i
&

7

A CRITICISM 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 1
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

t 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 modelsfor 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.’ 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 ?

' This I gather from the modification of the above passage in favour —

of ‘ the cheerful’ name of Walter Scott.

Ce a ee ee

IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF
ALL ART?

Mr. Matrruew Arnoxup’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
Seylla 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 aris. With this object in view, I choose a
paper by Mr. Walter Pater on ‘The School of Giorgione.’ !
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 e«sthetical 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 aris,
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 : !

B

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 ¢

1 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.

3 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 : !

=o ee
“er

| 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 esthetic 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 te
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 they
world.’ ! 4
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 ve
perfection of such poetry often seems to depend in part on a
certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so thai t

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.’ !

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 Téméraire or Raphael’s

~ §$chool 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: ?

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
their 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

! Fortnightly Review, p. 529. Here the italics are not Mr. Pater’s,
but mine.
? ‘Essays, Classical,’ pp. 113-115.
Z2

340 IS MUSIC 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’; Rossetti’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. Rigidly 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 OF ALL ART? 341

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
_ ease 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

849 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 considefation 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
defined intelligible content. Hach 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 tim
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 minim
of appeal to intelligence. Architecture, in its inability te
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; butit 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; if 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 idga rod xadod, is one and indivisible. But the
concrete shapes which manifest this beauty, decompose it,
just as the prism analyses white light into colours. ‘ Mult
_ terricolis lingus 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 Cherubini, sculpturesque ; Loren-

344 IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ?

zetti’s frescoes and Dante’s ‘Paradiso,’ 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 facade of the Certosa at Pavia, 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, esthetical
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 aris
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.

LO

THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN
POETRY

Some five years ago there appeared a little volume, named
‘Ros Rosarum 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 septis secretus nascitur hortis,
Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro,

346 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY

Quem mulcent aur, firmat sol, educat imber ;
Multi illum pueri, multe optavere puelle :

Idem quom tenui carptus defloruit ungui,

Nulli illum pueri, nulls optavere puelle :

Sic virgo dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est,
Quom castum amisit polluto corpore florem,
Nec pueris jocunda manet, nec 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 dsaehes 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 havel
referred is an Idyll by Ausonius. This poet, who lived from
309 to 892 a.p., was half pagan and half Christian. His
genius floated in the atmosphere of the decaying Roman
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 medieval,
and which pervades modern literature, the spirit of sympathy

> A
j r,
f

y THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 347
iy

f 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 preecesserat aura jugales,
AAstiferum suadens anticipare diem.

Errabam riguis per quadrua compita in hortis,
Maturo cupiens me vegetare die.

Vidi concretas per gramina flexa pruinas

- Pendere, aut olerum stare cacuminibus;

Caulibus et patulis teretes colludere guttas,
Et coelestis aque pondere tunc gravidas.

Vidi Pxstano candere rosaria cultu,
Exoriente novo roscida Lucifero.

Rara pruinosis canebat gemma frutetis,
Ad primi radios interitura die.

Ambigeres, raperetve rosis Aurora ruborem,
An daret, et flores tingeret orta dies.

Ros 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
Precipit unius muricis esse habitum.

Momentum intererat, quo se nascentia florum
Germina comparibus dividerent spatiis.

Hee viret angusto foliorum tecta galero:
Hee tenui folio purpura rubra notat.

Hee aperit primi fastigia celsa obelisci,
Mucronem absolvens purpurei capitis.

Vertice collectos illa exsinuabat amictus,

_ Jam meditans foliis se numerare suis :

Nec mora, ridentis calathi patefecit honorem,
Prodens inclusi semina densa croci.

Hee modo, que toto rutilaverat igne comarum
Pallida collapsis deseritur foliis.

Mirabar celerem fugitiva state rapinam,
Et, dum nascuntur, consenuisse rosas.

Kece, et defiuxit 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, #tas tam longa rosarum,
Quas pubescentes juncta senecta premit.

Quam modo nascentem rutilus conspexit Eous,
Hanc rediens sero vespere vidit anum.

Sed bene, quod paucis licet intefitura, diebus,
Succedens sevum prorogat ipsa suum.

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes,
Kt memor esto #evum 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 Philostratus, 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.
xaplev pddwv 5é yhpas
vedtntos ecxev ddunr.

ee

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

4 perceive its subdued lustre.

*T was 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 : Rise, 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,
Rolled with the weight of dews from heaven’s height shed ;
Saw the rose-gardens in their Pestan 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 fainting head with shame :—
So that I mused how swift time steals all worth,

How roses age and wither with their birth ;

350 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 Pose 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.!

ddxpva 8 & Maly, réco” exxéer, Socov “Adwris
aiua xéer Ta 58 wdvta worl xOovl ylyvera &vOn.
alwa pddov tlere:, Ta 5& Sdxpva Trav dveudvar.

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;

Roses 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 batilefield

_ 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.!

Languidetta come rosa,
Rosa 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.’

kat 7d pddov Kadrdy éort, kad 5 xpdvos abTd wapatver:
kal 7d Yov Kaddy éorw ey elapi, kal TaxXd ynpa*
kal KdAAOs KaAdy ort Td madiKdy, GAA’ GAlyor GH.

Fair is the rose, but time consumes her flower ;
Fair 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 : *
Nec viol semper, nec hiantia lilia florent;
Et viget amissa spina relicta rosa.
Et tibi jam cani venient, formose, capilli ;
Jam venient ruge que 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 time delves wrinkles on thy brow.

I might also quote an epigram of Rufinus to Rhodocleia,
in which he bids her bind blossoms on her brow, reminding
her the while that :

av0eis Kal Ahyers Kal ob Kal 6 orépavos.

For time 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 medisevalism 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 gid 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 pit giovinetta si dislega
Appena dalla boccia : eravi ancora
Chi le sue chiuse foglie all’ aer niega ;

Altra cadendo a pié 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 _ 3653

Le foglie a terra, allor mi venne a mente
Che vana cosa é il giovenil fiorire.
Ogni arbore ha i suoi fiori : e immantinente
Poi le tenere frondi al sol si piegano
Quando rinnoyvellar |’ 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,
Né senza gran periglio portar possano
Il proprio peso ; appena regger sogliono
Crescendo, ad or ad ora se 1’ addossono.
Vien poi l’ autunno, e maturi si cogliono
I dolci pomi: é passato il bel tempo,
Di fior di frutti e fronde al fin si spogliono.
Cogli la rosa, o ninfa, or ch’ é 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.
Red 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 ;

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 rose
while ye may,’ translated from the autumn of antique to th
April of modern poetry, and that note is echoed through
the love-literature of the Renaissance. Lorenzo, be
observed, has followed his model, not only in the close, b
also in the opening of the passage. Side by side with t
Florentine transcript from Ausonius I will now place Polizi
ano’s looser, but more poetical handling of the same them
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 l’ erba verde, e vaghi fior novelli,
Azurri gialli candidi e vermigli:

Ond’ io porsi la mano a cor di queili

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’ cd’ di quelle
Che pit vedi fiorite in sullo spino.
I’ mi trovai, etc.

Quando la rosa ogni suo’ foglia spande,
Quando é pit bella, quando é pit gradita ;
Allora é buona a mettere in ghirlande,

THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 355

Prima che sua belleza sia fuggita :
Sicché, fanciulle, mentre 6 pid 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.

i. Violets and lilies grew on every side

bs 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,
v- 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 ROSE 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’ eae i. st. 78) he thus
describes the rose :

Ma vie pit lieta pit 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 gracefu
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 las
lines of the Idyll thus:

Digli, zampogna mia, come via fugge
Cogli anni insieme la belleza snella .

THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY 357

E digli come il tempo né distrugge,

Né I eta persa mai si rinnovella: —
Digli che sappi usar suo’ forma bella,
Ché 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 ;

Roses and violets blossom not alway.

; To this refrain of Collige virgo rosas he is for ever

_ returning :
4 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.
Menire che il fiore é nella sua vagheza,

Coglilo ; che belleza poco dura.

Fresca é la rosa da mattina, e a sera
El’ 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. Ii first makes
its entrance into Italian poetry in these stanzas of Ariosto,
_ which are closely copied from the Latin :!

La verginella é simile alla rosa,
Ch’ in bel giardin su la nativa spina

1 Orl. Fur. i. 42, 43.
AAS’

358 THE PATHOS OF THE ROSE IN POETRY

Mentre sola e sicura si riposa,

Né gregge né pastor se le avvicina ;

L’ aura soave e l’ 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

Rimossa viene, dal suo ceppo verde,

Che quanto avea dagli uomini e dal cielo
Favor, grazia, e belleza, tutto perde.

La vergine che ’] fior, di che pit zelo

Che de’ begli occhi e della vita aver dé,
Lascia altrui cérre, il pregio ch’ avea innante
Perde nel cor di tutti gli altri amanti.

The translation made by Rose 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, unapproached 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
Ausonius, borrows one touch from Catullus in the following
famous passage of the ‘ Gerusalemme Liberata’: *

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 é pid bella.
Ecco poi nudo il sen gid baldanzosa
Dispiega; ecco poi langue e non par quella;
Quella non par, che desiata avanti

Fu da mille donzelle e mille amanti.

Cosi trapassa al trapassar d’ un giorno

Della vita mortale il fiore e il verde:

Né perché faccia indietro april ritorno,

Si rinfiora ella mai né si rinverde.

Cogliam la rosa in sul mattino adorno

Di questo di, che tosto il seren perde ;
Cogliam d’ amor la rosa; amiamo or quando
Esser si puote riamato amando.

4)
%

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 : !

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.

iz But lo! with bosom bared, the vaunting flower

i 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. Theswriter 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 yerdi sue tenere spoglie
Pure dianzi era rinchiusa,
E sotto l’ 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,
Il suo vermiglio ed odorato seno,
Dov’ ape susurrando
Nei mattutini albori
Vola, suggendo i rugiadosi umori ;
Ma gs’ allor non si coglie,
Sicché del mezzodi senta le fiamme,
Cade al cader del sole
Si scolorita in sulla siepe ombrosa,
Ch’ appena si pud 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,

O temenza |’ affrena,

La misera, tacendo,

Per soverchio desio tutto si strugge.
Cosi manca belta 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!’
K’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 loye’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 is 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 linkéd 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 368

_ It is now time to trace the influence of the Catullian and
_ Ausonian motives over English and French poetry. Spenser’s
aacnificent paraphrase from Tasso follows the original closely,
omits, whether intentionally or not, to dwell upon the line

2
1 Oo
D
ct

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 baréd 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 lovéd be with equal crime.

4 It so happens that none of the pieces which I have hitherto
| presented i 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
‘Ros Rosarum.’ Ronsard’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.? 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.* Here, in the French ‘ Cueillez, cuyillez
1 Faery Queen, ii. xii. 74, 75.
2 Ros Rosarum, p. 78. 8 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 Rose.

When we turn to English poetry, we find in Samuel
Daniel’s sonnet, ‘ Look, Delia,’ a pretty close rendering of
Tasso’s stanzas.” William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, applied
the metaphor of the rose to the waning of human life,
without any particular reference to youthful beauty.2 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 «
little fragment of Herrick’s. It occurs in a poem which was
borrowed straight from the lines of Theocritus quoted above

(p. 851) :°
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 Iam right in reading ‘sees’ in the last line but one,
then even here, too, we have a reminiscence of the Ausoniar
idyll.

From the analysis which I have partly made and partly
suggested in the foregoing pages, it will be seen how muck
modern poetry owes to now almost neglected sources in
antique literature, and with what varied gracefulness of ney
life the singers of the past four centuries invested themes
which they derived from scholarship. Other students, whe
have traversed different fields of European poetry, will
probably be able to complete the pedigree which I hay
endeavoured to establish in its main outlines from Ausonia
to Waller. J

1 Ros Rosarum, p. 80. * ‘Ibid. p. 119.
8 Ibid. p. 138. 4 Ibid. pp. 147, 150.
5 Ibid. p. 148. It is from ‘ The Cruel Maid.’

A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN WITH
VICTORIAN POETRY

I

EinewisH 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

Kuropean 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 medieval 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 Renaissance. 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 j
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, Rossetti, 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
@ 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,
| BB

370 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN

eS es oN ye

due to the felicitous circumstances of the nation in that
earlier period. F

II

What, then, is the characteristic of Elizabethan poetry ? :
I think the answer to this quéstion 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 |
Klizabethan 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
BB2

872 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, audgocity 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; Hast India was gained by
heroism and adventure worthy of a Drake and Raleigh; and
now the crown of that vast expire 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 Iago, 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 live
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 0
various complexions, that a world-fatigue has penetrated dee
into our spirit. The masterpiece of the century is Goethe’
Faust, and its hero suffers from the Welt-schmerz. A simpl
faith in God and the Bible yields to critical inquiry, compara

E SOE Aon i | a ee en

WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 373

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
yast 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 singin. 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.

Il

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 Kngland
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 ‘ Rape 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.! 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 novelfor 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 wa

' Darley, Landor, Beddoes, Horne, 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 previousromances. The

© Song of Roland’ is an epical lyric. We call the ‘ Hineid’~
an epic because it throbs with the sense of Rome. Zante

molis erat Romanam 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 ‘ Aineid,’
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
inverse? ‘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

ey

376 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN

has presided over the birth of this piece, reflection has attended 4
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 a
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, Rossetti, 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’ 6 dolce in questo mar.’! 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 Rossetti’s ballads, Coleridge's q
‘Ancient Mariner’ and Keats’ odes, Clough’s ‘ Haster Day J
and Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ Swinburne’s ‘Songs before Sunrise ”

/and Browning’s ‘Dramatis Persone,’ 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 VICTORIAN 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 Kitna’ and Ebenezer Jones’s ‘ Pagan Drinking
z 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
_Vyric 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,’ Clough’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. Cary’s
Dante, Rossetti’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,’ IH. 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 A COMPARISON OF ELIZABETHAN

author of ‘In Memoriam’ struck a false hile 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, BY
And with much toil attain to half-believe. i

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
eesthetical 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.
Roden Noel, too little appreciated to be rightly understood,
attempts a world-embracing metaphysic of mysticism. Hven
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 lacrime 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.
y 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 considéres comme un but, elle n’est qu’un effet.’
‘The result is a polychromatic abundance of what may be
ealled 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 our 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 throug h
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. q

Vv

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.' Taken in connection witk
the songs from the dramatists and the collected lyrics
of men like Sidney, Raleigh, 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 an¢

! They are published by Mr. J. C. Nimmo, the last of them, callec
‘Love Poems from the Song-Books of the Seventeenth Century,’ bein
privately printed.

WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 381

irectness of utterance. Like Shelley’s skylark, the poet has

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
t are not all of one kind or of equal simplicity. The lyrics
_ from the song-books, for example, have not the ci ei: 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
_ 80 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 aérial
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
heed 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 dedal 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

' Madame Goldschmidt sang these lines from the book of Handel’s
Sampson. In Milton they begin with where, not let. :

WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 583

sxxtent the best lyrics of the Victorian age are not made to
ye 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:

sO
il

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.

PE. Rabo

reflective, questioning ; his stanza will not suit the directness

from Keats and Shelley, ‘charmed magic casements,’ ‘ perilous
seas,’ ‘that liquid splendour,’ perplex and impede the
movement of song.

But Wordsworth in the last of these examples is meditative, |

of musical melody. But the finest phrases in the specimens |

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 tolbot :
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, Elizabethar
lyrics will compare not unfavourably with Victorian. Th
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, bu
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 tha
‘inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.’ The Victoriar
lyric, superior in its range, suggestiveness, variety, and
richness, inferior in its spontaneity and birdlike intonation,
corresponds to the highly-strung and panharmonic instrumen
of the poet’s spirit which produced it, and to the manifol
sympathies of the reader’s mind for which it was intended
It is iridescent with the intermingled hues of faney,‘ con
templation, gnomic wisdom, personal passion, discursiy

WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 385

thetoric, idyllic picture-painting. Modes of complicated
xpression, involving serried reasoning, audacious metaphors
lliptical imagery, and rapid modulation from one key of
eeling to another, which a playwright like Shakespeare
mployed 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
lialogue 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:

be) For he is like to something I remember,
a A great while since, a long, long time ago.

Here is the sweetness of Dekker :

a No, my dear lady, I could weary stars,

4 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,
CC

|

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 ¢
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 ig
volatilised ; in Wordsworth it is somewhat thin and arid;
in Tennyson it is sumptuous; in Rossetti 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, haye
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 tha i
musical idyll—* Come down, O maid, from yonder moun Bi
height,’ which closes upon two incomparable lines of linkec
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.

Vit

_ 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.
| Superfiuities of every kind abound, and at the same time we
jare 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

cc2

AN a ae es ON

‘not of the miser; of the genial spendthrift, whose imprudence

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 dre the vices of the prodigal,

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 b
critical education, and moulded by the writers of Quee
Anne’s reign, might rebel against rules, but could not helt
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 io 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,
& @ cousciousness of his aims and how to attain them, together
2 with a high standard of verbal execution, are combined with
richness of fancy and sensuous magnificence worthy of an
; Beereebothen poet in all his glory.
When, therefore, we compare the two epochs upon this
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

ues

_ into the rigidity of the last century.

VIitl

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 Hlizabethan 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

q

;

WITH 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
pa of penetrative scrutiny is plunged and replunged into the
_ deepest and most sensitive recesses of our being. But the
i 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.
i 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

f

ff

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,

a eS ee ee eee

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,

_ 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,’
e special forms of poetry they cultivated—idyllic and con-
" templative verse, lyric in its extended sense, descriptive and
“teflective—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
Bowert 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 i 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 ?

_ Tennyson, Rossetti: it is clear, by only mentioning the leading —

394 A COMPARISON 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 tothe 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 3
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. qi

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
P i; it opens wider horizons and excites the spirit more than
verse can do. Where are the fictions of the fancy compared
Bvith the vistas revealed by astronomers, biologists, physicists,
geologists ? Yet signs are not wanting—I see them i in some

' great neglected work of Roden 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 1530 to the year 1650, the other covering the
“whole of the nineteenth century, and dating from the publica-
_ tion of Walter Savage Landor’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.
g TI 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 limitation$ ; not as the Elizabethans
had employed it, loosely, with variety of pause and period,
and with frequent enyambements 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 —

WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 397

; the development of mechanical industry, have saddened and
ze ibdued 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
i “optimism of their predecessors; and finally to what extent
i 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
ina 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. Hach 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

398 ELIZABETHAN AND VICTORIAN POETRY

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 distinguishés 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 Restora-—
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.’ 4

ii

APPENDIX

DARWIN’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.’ 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.’* Having arrived at the
epention that ontology is hardly a fit topic for the human reason,
arwin states his own attitude in the following modest phrases : ®

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,’* 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. * P, 307,

4

q

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 : ?

He considers that the theory of Evolution is quite compatible with

the belief in a God; but that you must femember 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 prersaae
abandonment of revelation.” He felt that the immortality of the
soul has to be regarded as an open question.® He discussed Pes-
simism with a clear perception of its ground and issues; and on
the whole he pronounced himself a moderate Optimist. He re-
jected the subjective or sentimental ‘ argument for the existence of i
an intelligent God, drawn from the deep inward conviction and
feelings which are experienced by most persons.’*® 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.’® 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.’ 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.® Returning at
last to the point from which we started, he declares:® ‘I cannot

;

i Poser.

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,’ ete. P. 316, ‘ But then with
me the horrid doubt,’ etc,

® Pp. 3138. 4

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

‘deserved to be called a Theist.’ !
_ 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 Agnosties,
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.’ He continued to regard God as the theologians of English
{ orthodoxy made Him—as a being constructing the world from
utside, planning its contrivances and directing each event toa
alculated 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.
Tt 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,’ &c.
2 P, 313, ‘ The mind refuses,’ down to p. 316, ‘ existed in the moon.’
8 This is confirmed by a very emphatic confidence about Paley in a
etter to Sir John Lubbock. Life, vol. ii. p. 219.
DD

402 APPENDIX

proceeds to another instance: ‘If you believe so (z.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, thas 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."
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,
enat, 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 o
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:* ‘The theory of Evolution is
quite compatible with the belief in a God.’

! See in particular p. 309, ‘Although I did not think,’ down to
‘which the wind blows.’
2 P. 307.

APPENDIX 403

THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE

_Noruine 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
2 _ Ontology, have no foundation except in the subjectivity of man.
Both are seen to involve impertinences, naivetés, 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,
pp2

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 d6 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.
7 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 :

c. 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.
Rank 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 ae mab

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 genufiection 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

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!

407

408 APPENDIX

NOTES ON THEISM

I

It is possible for a man to be a theist in the etymological sense of —
that word, z.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 E.
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 in 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—z.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, like 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

atpaiteid

APPENDIX 409

efforts to accommodate the sanctities of religious reverence with the
sarnestness of scientific seeking after truth, all heartfelt endeavours
fo worship God, ‘not on this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,’ but
iterally ‘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. Qwis 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 Reality, 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-Diimmerung, the day of dying for our planet, comes.
Meanwhile for man, through all these transformations of the
religious idea, abides one motto fixed: rovs (avras ed Spar, ‘ while
living do thy duty.’ ’

1 These words were written before the publication of Darwin’s Life,
vol. i. p. 307. See p. 899, above.

410 APPENDIX

Ir

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.’' 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 Ia
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! 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, O 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” ?’? 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

! 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

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

| 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

ie ash between natural appetite and social law, to the morbid
| torments of moral madness and slow-fretting physical cancers, to
ix 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 Bs

Thave 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 #he world-storm, yields to God,
drowns in God, finds no other God than this. "

KaAel 8’ axotvovras ovdév
"Ev péog Svomadei Te 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
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 CRITERION 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 gifte¢
with aionois 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 witho
the help of hearing, of eyesight, of sense of touch. By far the
larger number of our expressions for mental or esthetic qualities
as taste, gotit, gusto, Geschmack, flair, fiwto, tact, sensibility,
comprehension, are transferred from the region of the senses and
used metaphorically.

The common perception of normal men and women, who ¢
not insensible to beauty, not impervious to ideas, will ultimate
decide the question whether any work of art is first rate, second
rate, or worthless.

APPENDIX 418

_ 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
é in common between L. B. Alberti and Pugin on the subject of
pointed architecture ?

Hach individual has but a limited perceptive faculty, and this is
i still further limited by the prevalent state of the age in which he

a
hia pe

lives.

E

_ The consensus regarding Homer, Pheidias, Virgil, Dante, Shake:
| speare, now amounts to certainty. The agreement about a poet like
'D. G. Rossetti has not reached that point. A man who utters
authoritative opinions for or against Rossetti carries the weight
‘only of his own perception, backed up in either case by the per-
septions of a limited number of men who feel like him. In the
: long-run, Rossetti 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 in sculpture, may enjoy temporary applause. But
even during the fwrore 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. Really 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 Rossetti ;
‘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') 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, ie :

NOTE ON ‘REALISM AND IDEALISM’

I

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 prepossessigns, colouring the

+ * Inquiries into Human Faculty,’ p. 340.

APPENDIX A15

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
y portraits of Christ were produced, which have been subsequently
_ elaborated into one highly idealised conception by the slow con-
tinuous process of centuries.

am PS SES a ee

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.

ae aed

i
4.
Ls
i
U.

416 APPENDIX

III

In other departments of literature, notably in romance and
fiction, the same principles hold good. We have heard muc n
lately of realistic novels. But even Zola, with his notebook and
his catalogues of objects, is compelledito 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.’! ‘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

ertain element of inadequacy, a certain admixture of illusion, in
al 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, Raphael’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 s0, 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-
aking 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
a0tes 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-
ppevitutes 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-
‘ EE

é
a

418 APPENDIX

~ duces reality. Transmutation into human stuff or idealisation is
the condition under which man works. .

NOTE ON ‘THE MODEL’

Tue female form has less variety than the male. It cannot)
symbolise so many modes of vigorous existence. There are severe i

running, the spreading abroad of the limbs, and wherever the belly
and pelvis are extended by physical effort. Raphael, in his drawing
of Roxana visited by Alexander, and in his fresco of Venus rising’
in her car, upon the Farnesina ceiling, adopted graceless feniale -
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

in the Venus de’ Medici, attitude of sexual capeonivenane 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
ad Dawn at San Lorenzo) in the male key; and obtained some
ticeable tragic effects therefrom.

_ Praxiteles treated the male nude (especially in his Apollo
jauroktonos and the Neapolitan torso of Bacchus) in the female
ey, and obtained some noticeable sensuous effects therefrom.

_ Artists of a (i.) distinctly intellectual order, like Michel Angelo
nd Signorelli, use the male nude for decorative purposes—roof of
istine Chapel, arabesques at Orvieto. Artists of a (ii.) sensual
ype, like Correggio, use either the hermaphroditic male for
ecorative purposes (Parma cupolas) or the female; as indeed do
Ji decorators of theatres, baths, places of enjoyment built for
nen. The first class of artists appeal to a sublime and abstract
ense of form; the second, to natural instincts.

- Draughtsmen like Bartolozzi have treated the male and female
aude together in a mixed key, sacrificing the essential qualities of
ach, not to an animal desire, but to a flaccid sentiment, which
marks the decadence of art. This is not the case with antique
iermaphroditic statues. These consciously confuse the male and
emale keys, employing a Mixo-Lydian mood, for purposes of
indisguised voluptuousness.

_ The colourist gets silvery tones from the female, tawny tones
rom the male ; smooth surfaces and soft chiaroscuro fromthe
male, abrupt lights and shades with angular modelling of surface
rom the male.

_ He does best who utilises these sexual differences by properly
uccentuating 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
uitributing 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.

* PRIORITY OF THOUGHT TO LANGUAGE

Ir 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.
: EE2

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 lamguage 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 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 tha i
thought is prior to language. 4

COLOUR-SENSE AND LANGUAGE

Tuer 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 conneciec
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, cole
involves neither affairs of life and death, nor affairs of property,

APPENDIX 421

Le nguage, therefore, leaves it alone, at least such language as enters

nto literature.

Xenophanes describes the rainbow by the simplest generic

words:
. moppupeov Kat powwikeoy Kad xAwpdy idécOat,

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
wenettan red, chrome yellow, verditer, épinards vomis, cadmium,
burnt sienna, vandyke brown, merda d’oca, wmber, 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 pink, 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.

= =
~ See

422 | APPENDED 0000 ae

Our experience, however, must not make us draw a wrong ¢ on-
clusion 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. Th
shifts we submit to in order to communicate sensations of colo
ought rather to teach us that in the Homeric or other early age:
colours were fully appreciated by the senses, but had not foun
ee analogues in language.

Apearvs, epistle of, 71
Academy, 360
Acting, art of, 91
_ Addison, 388
_ Aschylus, 39-40, 178, 219, 255,
_ 819, 322; quoted, 38, 179
Agathon, dramatist, 40-1
_ Agnosticism, 400-4, 411
Alberti, 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,
' 188, 342, 413
_ Aretino, 106, 161, 390; quoted,
™ 155-6
_ Ariosto, poet, 50, 195, 282, 320,
_—-:828, 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

INDEX

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 seg.; 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 Rose,’ 347-50

Ausonius, Gregorius, 274

Austen, Jane, 374.

Autotype Company, 130 n.

Baca, 101

Bacon, Lord, 76, 211, 368, 372
Baffo, poet, 164

Balzac, 51, 238

Barnes, 377

424

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, poet, 317, 390

. Beddoes, poet, 374 »., 389

Beethoven, 90, 340

Bellini, Gian, 46, 54, 57, 116 1.

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 7.

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

Bondasea, glaciers of, 300-1

Bonifazio, painter, 143

Borgia, Roderigo, 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. R. 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, Robert, 297, 368, 374 .,
375, 378, 389; quoted, 386

Brunelleschi, architect, 84

Bruno, Giordano, 2, 4, 26, 106,
286-7, 290

Buchanan, Robert, 366, 377

INDEX

Buddha, 252, 411 4
Buffon, quoted, 277
Bullen, A. H., 380
Buonarroti, 104
Burke, Edmund, 235
Burne-Jones, painter, 314
Burns, Robert, 324
Burton, 211 |
Byron, Lord, 219, 238, 297, 322,
328-333, 368-88, 393-4

-—— lO

CaLiimacuus, 229

Calvin, 69

‘Cambyses,’ play, 34

Camden, 366, 368

Campanella, poet, 105;
260-1

Campbell, poet, 368, 382

Caracci, Annibale, 54-5, 57

Caricature in art, 155-65

Carlyle, Thomas, 230, 233, 390

Carpaccio, painter, 54

Cary’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

Chrerémon, dramatist, 40-1, 270

Chapman, 368 ; ‘ Homer,’ 374

Characterisation in art, 137-154

Charles II., 245

Chartres Cathedral, 84, 102

Chatterton, poet, 396

Chaucer, poet, 368-9

Cheke, 366

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

quoted,

Cleanthes (the Stoic), 9, 10, 18-19,
411; quoted, 410

Clough, A. H., 267, 368, 376-7;
quoted, 578

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, Auguste, 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;
53-78
Crowne, dramatist, 36
Culture, philosophy of, 7

principles of,

‘DA Fapriano, 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; ‘ Paradiso,’ 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

I oom and theology, 10, 27-8,
7

_ D’Aumale, Duc, 134

| Davenant, dramatist, 9, 34, 36, 49
David, King, 411; quoted, 202,
_ 410

' David, artist, 125

de Foix, Gaston, 142

INDEX

425

,

de’ Medici, Cosimo, 106

de’ Medici Giovanni, 106

de’ Medici Lorenzo, 127, 356, 358,
360 ; quoted, 352-4

de Musset, 238; quotéd, 254-5

de Quincey, on style, 227-232

Death, 17-18, 405

Defoe, Daniel, 264

Dekker, dramatist, 267,
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

Doré, Gustav, 222

Dossi, Dosso, painter, 57

Dostoieffsky, 267

Dowden, Prof., 25 ».

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 ».

368 ;

EICKERMANN, 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

Farrrax, 360, 374
Farnesina, 134, 418

426

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 x.,

16 7.

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, Théophile, 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

Giadstone, W. E., 232-3; on
Homer, 69

Gluck, composer, 348

Goethe, 2, 51, 219, 222, 235, 289,
297, 322; on God and nature, 1;
on criticism, 6, 8; Proémium 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 ‘ Ulrich,’ 267

Grande Chartreuse, 293-4

Gray, poet, 289, 395 ; quoted, 293-4

Greene, dramatist, 9, 35, 39

INDEX

Greuze, painter, 101

Guarini, poet, 345; ‘ Pastor Fido,’
244, 360; quoted, 360-2

Guest, Dr., 76, 207 ;

Guicciardini, historian, 195

Guido, painter, 57, 419

Hatxaw’s ‘ Literature of Europe,’ 8

t
s
§
>

Handel, composer, 382 ., 383

Hardy, Thomas, 267

Hartmann, 392 :

Haydon’s ‘ Autobiography,’ quoted,
121-3 ;

Hazlitt, 371; qwoted, 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

Hemang, Mrs., 382

Henniquin, Emile, 218 »., 221 n.

Henry VII., 365

Henry VIIL., 365

Heraclitus, 70, 308; qwoted, 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

Horne, 374 n.

Hughes, William, 37, 75

Hugo, Victor, 219, 222, 235, 238

Humility, 22

Hunt, William, 115

Huxley, Professor, 28

ae ee dle mC Oe

Iprauism and Realism, 108-127,
414-18

Immortality, hope of, 18, 405

Ingres, painter, 57, 129

Intellect (see under Mind)

Italian Renaissance, 103-7

|
.

Kant, 65, 288 ;
Keats, 295, 297, 326, 329, 368, 371,

1

Jataww ’p Din, poet, 303-4
James I., 366, 393

James, Henry, 416 7.

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,

881, 387, 389; ‘ Poetaster,’ 229

Joubert, quoted, 119
_ Julius II., 106
_Juvenal, 184, 235, 272

quoted, 153

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, Rudyard, 267
_ Klopstock, poet, 323

Knowledge, the limits of, 403-7

_ Kyd, poet, 35

_ Lazrttvus, Diogenes, 70
Lamb, Charles, 371
-~Landor,

W. §8., 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

_ Lempriére, 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,
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

6-9,

Lorraine, Claude, 281, 283

Loti, Pierre, 267

INDEX

427

| Lotze, 65

Lucan, 273

Lucea, 142

Lucretius, 164, 271, 317
Luini, painter, 54
Luther, Martin, 191
Luxembourg, 130
Lycophron, 229

Lyell, Sir Charles, 27
Lyly, 230

Macavray, 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

eer poet, 50, 57, 164, 230, 413,

17

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, 235; ‘ 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

Miracles, 4

Model, the, 113, 119-122, 128-136,
144, 418-19 5

Moliére, 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 7.

Mozart, 58, 90, 101

Muretus, 221

Muszus, 70

Music, province of, 82 seq., 100-1,
138, 151; the type of all art,
335-344

Myers, F. W. H., 287 2, 338-9 n.

Myths, 300-14 ’

Napuss, 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 7.

Nisard, M., 215

Noel, Roden, 297, 377-8, 395

Norton, dramatist, 37

Novalis, gwoted, 89

Novel, evolution of the, 51

OKEN, 8

Oliphant, Thomas, 380
Olympia, 419

Orvieto, 419

Ovid, 271-2; quoted, 351-2

PAINTING (see wnder Art)
Paley, 401-2
Palladio, architect, 45, 413

INDEX

Palma, junior, painter, 57

Parma, 282 n.

Parthenon, the, 84, 87, 122-3, 139,
179, 185

Pascal, 136

Pater, Walter, 340-2; ‘School of

poreione,’ 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 ., 365-398 ;
Pathos of the Rose in, 274 m.,
345-64; a criticism of life, 315-
34

Poggio, 366

Poliziano, poet, 106, 195, 215, 282,
328, 345, 358, 360, 366 ; quoted,
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 .

Quinti1ANn, 188

Rapewats, 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

|

]

ee a

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

_ Buskin, John, 8, 126, 176, 230

SackviLxe, dramatist, 37
8. Lorenzo, Library of, 84

INDEX

429

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; eyolution
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,
3827, 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,
868, 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,
880; criticism of his works,
73-4

Siena, 46

Signorelli, painter, 46, 54, 80, 419

430

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 Roland,’ 62

Sophocles, 40-1, 56, 107, 123, 142,
219, 319-22, 348, 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, R. 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 .

Taortus, 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

INDEX

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 Religion)

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 ”., 191

Vau, Bregaglia, 300

Valerius, Flaccus, 273

Valla, 71

Van Eyck, John, 112, 281, 282 .

Vasari, Giorgio, 49, 116 .

Velasquez, painter, 112, 149

Venice, 282 n.

Veronese, Paul, 226

Versailles, Palace of, 84

Victoria, Queen, 372

Victorian Poetry, 365-98

Vienna, 129 ., 130 m.

Virgil, 70, 86, 186, 230, 234-5,
264, 271-4, 280, 289, 319, 322,
338-9, 351, 3870, 387, 413;
Aineid, 171, 375; quoted, 183,
287, 378

Volapuk, 242

Voltaire, 238, 317, 323

Von Ranke, 235

Voysey, Rev. Mr., 408

Vulgate, the, 187-91, 210

WAGNER, composer, 313
Walker, Frederick, 268

vi aller, poet, 345, 364
Watts, painter, 314

.
b]

quoted, 175,
333-4 ; and Democratic Art, 237_
268

Wilde, Oscar, 75, n.

Wilkie, Sir David, 264

Wilson, dramatist, 36

Windsor, 282, n.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 365

INDEX

431

Wordsworth, 164, 266, 271, 289_
290, 297, 368, 371-2, 376-8,
382-3, 386, 393-4; quoted, 114,
140, 225-6, 291-4, 325 -34, 383 ;

_ Arnold on, 315, 322_7

Wren, Sir Christopher, 167, 413

Wyatt, 395

XENOPHANEs, quoted, 421

Zoua, Emile, 126, 416; ‘La Terre,’
265

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PN Symonds, John Addington

- 45 Essays, speculative and
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1907

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