us. The reason is, obviously, that we have left the physical behind We know and care almost nothing about beauty in the nude human form, which the Greek delighted to cultivate. The athlete is not now our type of manhood; we have learned to prefer such ideals as Hamlet and the Christ. To me it seems that there is something wrong in the view of those who regard this as a thing to be deplored, from the standpoint of "pure beauty," or from any other standpoint. Let any one go from hearing a Beethoven symphony and gaze at the Apollo Belvedere, and he is not likely to regret the change in Art's ideals and methods. It seems, therefore, that what is the height of beauty to one age is not necessarily so to the next. What pleases the child seems childish to the cultured man; and here as elsewhere the history of the individual is the history of the race. To us the swift-footed Achilles sulking in his tent is not terrible; and when Homer's goddesses hurl cliffs at one another we merely smile. The Pauline theology, which when it first smote upon the apostle's mind was a sublime solution of the eternal mystery, is now equally inadequate. Nor is this true of the things of the intellect only. It is conceivable that the ages yet to act upon the human form, may evolve it to a new stage, from which the Venus may cease to please at all; just as no savage countenance, however idealized, can be beautiful to any but a savage. Such propositions may seem daring: they can best be defended upon a priori grounds. Beauty is a purely ideal conception, the type of the Divine Unity, as we agreed to call it. In the course of "this dance of plastic circumstance" we try to express that conception to the senses. But in the progress of an evolution stretching through æons to which a thousand years are as a day, both the conception and the senses change, the former expanding and the latter becoming more refined and delicate. The embodiment can then be satisfactory no longer. It is only the thing shadowed forth,—the Eternal Verity,—that does not change. This is, of course, high doctrine; but there is no happiness for But the soul in its best moments knows that the truer note is caught by Newman: “What is the world to thee, my heart? Thou hast no owner's part In all its fleetingness." Or as Shelley himself puts it, writing of his disappointment in the lady of Epipsychidion,—“The error lay in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal." It will be contended against this view of the progress of the Beautiful and the sublime, that it does not take into account the truths of the heart, which are the prime subjects of Art and which never change. But such truths (or rather, what we have to do with, man's knowledge of them) have been whirled in the loom of time with all things else. I shall not venture to deny the doctrines of innate or revealed ideas; but I merely ask what these ideas are. Are they of the goodness and omnipotence of the Deity? The savage does not know of these. The belief has been gradually evolved, and it is not yet entirely learned. I do believe that it might still be possible to find a civilized man with a vague idea that there is such a being as the Devil and such a place as Hell. Or, are these truths of the relation of man to man, of universal love? Socrates taught a vigorous doctrine of hatred of enemies; and the Psalmist lay on his death bed gasping: "And behold thou hast with thee Shimei, the son of Gera, which cursed me with a grevious curse in the day when I went to Mahanaim. Now therefore hold thou him not guiltless; but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood." Such an assertion of the perishability of the products of Art requires, it is true, one obvious qualification. There comes a time when progress has gone so far that some strong soul in a moment of vision succeeds in piercing the veil and speaking Truth Absolute, beyond which there can be no going. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness!" is such an example, a culmination in both the Beautiful and the sublime. These last would bring us back to the main question. It has been said the perfect artist would be he who combined in the highest degree both beauty and sublimity, form and content: but perfection is a rare gift of the gods, and so in the world of art we recognize two types of men, in their highest representatives, personifications of one principle or the other. First, there are the pioneers of humanity, the men of that intensity of spirit which is the essence of genius, the men who live at white heat, fighting the world's battles and weeping for the world's woe, men to whom rest appears sin, and to be satisfied, damnation. These are the voices crying in the wilderness: "Prepare ye the way of the Lord!" These are the climbers of the mountain who catch the first rays of the dawn and sing of its coming; these are the men of faith, the Non-Conformists, whom the world stares at, and ridicules, and crucifies, and to whom it builds its monuments. These are in the truest sense of the word Types of the Divine Infinity; these are the Priests of the Sublime. Such men are art's leaders, and yet it is not strange that they do not rest in beauty. When Christ bids his disciples "consider the lilies of the field," it is that they may draw a moral from them. And similarly Ruskin asserts in Modern Painters, that such poets as Dante and Milton notice the flowers scarcely at all. These, however, are stern men and stern doctrines; they are not virginibus puerisque, and so it is not surprising that the lovers of beauty revolt. There have been men with the courage to vow both Dante and Milton unreadable. Shelley (who affords by the way an interesting opportunity to judge what would be the attitude of an ancient Greek to our Art) speaks thus of Michael Angelo: "I cannot but think the genius of this artist highly overrated. He has not only no temperance, no modesty, no feeling for the just boundaries of art, but he has no sense of beauty. What a thing his Moses is -how distorted from all that is natural and majestic! I think with astonishment and indignation of the common notion that he equals and in some respects exceeds Raphael." It would be interesting to hear what the terrible sculptor of the Moses would retort concerning the author of Prometheus Unbound. We may imagine, when we hear the modern Titan, Carlyle, remarking that "the whole poetical endowment (of Keats) consists in a weakeyed maudlin sensibility and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature." And similarly, in the letters to Emerson, the Idyls of the King are celebrated for "finely elaborated execution and inward perfection of vacancy. In our own time we recognize precisely the same state of affairs when we find Matthew Arnold placing Wordsworth and Byron in order after Shakespeare and Milton on the ground of their possessing "high poetic seriousness" and "a profound criticism of life," and Mr. Swinburne on the other hand maintaining, with his usual vehemence and vivacity, that the only tests of greatness in poetry are melody and imagination, and accordingly awarding the prizes to Shelley and Coleridge. All of this certainly seems extreme enough. But when men seize upon a half-truth, they seem to delight in carrying it to absurdity; and accordingly, as soon as we leave the mountain-tops and the company of genius and descend among less far-seeing men, we have, on the one hand, easy-going dilettanti who call themselves partisans of beauty, and maintain that the duty of art and the world is to stop where it is, and devote itself to getting the maximum of delight out of things as they stand. This is extreme, "but for Art's sake"; and its task in life is building fine roads that lead nowhere. On the other hand are the ascetics, reducing their share of the truth to an equal absurdity. These are they who grasp at the shadow and lose the substance; they see that spiritual perfection is the end to which body and mind are cultivated, but they are in so great haste to get at the end, or so fearful of missing it through their own weakness, that they omit the means and so content themselves with a soul undeveloped and that shadow-picture of virtue, a morality of maxims. But from these latter, Art is fortunately separated by its concrete nature. When the moralist produces a work of Art the skeleton of "purpose" is generally too plainly visible through its scanty garb of flesh. Humanity loves not sermons, and least of all sermons masquerading as works of Art. If he be a poet his I have often thought that this concrete nature of art, previously referred to, renders it the safest guide in the dangerous regions of mysticism and faith. The true artist may content himself with no glittering generalities based upon nothing, no platitudes empty of life. He must be master of the realm of fact as well as of thought. He may not merely gush over Nature's sublimities; his task is to show them, which means that he must live with Nature, sharing her sunshine and her storm, her joy and her sorrow. He may not prate about universal love; he must love his neighbor. task is not to tell us of the beauty of virtue, but to set a good man before us in his thought and act-a thing which he cannot do unless he be good himself. Thus it is that Art's messages are charged with an energy that carries them straight to the heart; and the knowledge stored up in Art's masterpieces is accordingly always the nearest and dearest to men. For it is quite certain that knowledge which has not pierced to the heart (by which is meant the inner essence, the ego that rules both mind and will,) is no real knowledge but only its shadow. Every one knows that space is infinite, that the nearest stars are so many millions of miles away, and that this earth is an atom to the smallest of them. And yet it may be that only once in the course of a heedless lifetime,-perhaps while standing alone by the shore of the midnight ocean,-the great fact is stabbed into the soul, and the man staggers back and lifts his hands in prayer. "Oh, Brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it never at any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnamable? Came it never like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans, like the voice of old eternities far-sounding through thy heart of hearts? Never ?" Let us hope so. For it is such moments as these, that, sinking us with the realization of our own insignificance and raising with the thought of our own infinity, give dignity to life and authority to heroism, make us brothers of humanity and children of one God. It |