nothing of the nature of the thing about which he has to speak, the poet cannot rend at will and fling from about him as a useless thing the language, with its inherent rationality and weight of gathered experience through the ages, in which he is to express himself; nor can he disregard for a moment, if he would make himself understood, the construction of words into sentences in a rational way, and in accordance with the genius of the language he is using. His freedom may be as wide as the range of possibility, but of possibility within the range of his art; and the poetic art is not a lawless and irrational arbitrium, but with all its sentiment and feelings, and its national and local associations, an address of reason to reason in a rational way. And so, while there cannot be an outward standard of taste for all, there must be some universal principle or principles of judgment involved in all productions of art. Nature and the laws of nature and of human nature are behind and within them all and made known by them; and art is great in proportion as it gives utterance to these in their ideal excellence-in truth, and fulness, and intensity. The scratching of the mammoth by the troglodytes was ruled by the nature of the mammoth, and the sculpture-paintings of Egyptians and Assyrians by the thought of the nature of each object represented, and the characteristic differences of men and animals; and truth and fidelity to nature must be at the root and in the heart of all excellence of representation, whether in architecture, or sculpture, or music, or painting, or poetry, or rhetoric, or anything else which can properly be included in art. There is a nature in things which it is the vocation of the artist to represent; and, while he may be

limited in various ways by the medium of representation, by his own experience and relative conceptions of what it should be, and by his power of execution, and so forth, his work is necessarily judged of by us all in the light of our relative conceptions of the power and purity of his representation. Our conceptions of it may be varied in accordance with our experience and delicacy of perception, but they are relatively true; and one of the worst judgments that could be passed on it is, it is not natural.

Is nature, then, it may be asked, to be conceived of as higher than art? and is art to be only imitation? The latter question has been already answered with sufficient emphasis, and as clearly as need be, I think. Art must in every case be natural; but, in the higher departments of it, it is not only imitation, but inspiration and interpretation as well. Imitation merely would not be much in music; and as to whether nature is higher than art, it is one of those questions continually turning up in common life and philosophy which are full of snares for the unwary. What nature, and what art, is it that you speak of? and what do you mean by higher? For nature, without further qualification or definition, is a very vague term; and there is art and art, and art may be as natural as a blade of grass or a gleam of sunshine. I leave a picture gallery among the Highland hills, and am immediately, when over the threshold, brought face to face with the outward, material world in its most picturesque aspects and with some of its grandest scenery. I have not been particularly struck with anything in the gallery except with its studies of female nudity and the fleshly art; and, when I step out under the open sky and into a vision of the surrounding hills, with all their

graceful flowing lines and varied lights and shadows, in the quiet sunshine of a summer's day, I feel as if I had come from darkness into light, from ghastliness and frivolity into grandeur and glory, and I repeat, with a consciousness of the worthlessness comparatively of art,-the art just seen,—

But I stand before another great religious painting just fresh from the bands of a master, or I listen to the eloquence of an astronomer discoursing on the infinities of space and the sublimities of the universe as disclosed by the greatest telescopes, and I am awed and overpowered with the glory; and, when I pass into the streets, I feel as if my visions in art had deprived the daylight even of its brightness, and that man could make something higher than anything of its kind that could be seen in nature-something superior far in effect and power; and by these same visions I am made to realize, not that there is a great gulf fixed between nature and art, between the works of God and the works of man, but that a painting, or a poem, or a musical composition may be as natural a growth as a tree, or a flower, or a mountain, and as much of a 'work divine and product of the grace of God. In the one we have God through nature, and in the other through human nature; and the latter, as the higher of the two natures, may be the better medium for the production of beauty of symbol and expression. An artist may never, by mere imitation, and to a close inspection of the material, vie with nature so-called

in delicacy of tinting and composition in vein and leaf; but he may give us more of spirit, more of the idea of the thing, and in relations that are more suggestive. Take the same number of real leaves and spires of grass as you find represented in the frontispiece of Ruskin's Two Paths, and compare them with "The Grass of the Field," as therein given, and you will find that while, to a minute and microscopical examination of its parts, the artist's work must yield at once to nature's products, in general effect and suggestiveness the artist has the better of nature. But nature and art are not to be opposed, for both are natural and divine,

and “each thing in its place is best."]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF BEAUTY AND DIFFERENCES
IN TASTE.

WE

E have written at length on the development of taste, and we have asked and answered the question, Can there be a standard of taste? But we have not yet asked ourselves, what some perhaps might regard as the most important and most difficult query within the whole range of aesthetics, What is the origin of our ideas of beauty? Let our tastes be what they may, as diverse as the individuals exhibiting them or the same in all, highly developed and delicate, or the reverse, how has the idea of beauty ever come to be realized? How have any of us come to see anything as beautiful, or to think of anything as beautiful? What are the conditions of the existence of taste, or of the perception of beauty by man or by beast-if it be that beasts have any such perception?

To people not read in philosophy such questions will appear, I have no doubt, either stupid or trifling. "How else," they will ask, "could we have any idea of anything being beautiful but by seeing it, or hearing it? We get our knowledge of things as beautiful as we get our knowledge of anything else, by experience. We see such and such things, and we hear such and such things, and they are beautiful or the reverse, just as they are large or small, round or square, heavy