pre-determined their action. He saw no Whiggism but only Whigs, and he wondered at the mistakes of the Whigs when he should have been tracing the development of their doctrine and its influence on politics, commerce and established institutions. This, in Acton's view, is all wrong. "The great object, in trying to understand history, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more than that of legitimate parents." The work and place of a scientist is determined by measuring the gap in the state of the science before he came and after he went. The progress of the science is more to the world than the idiosyncrasy of the scientist. So also in history. "The vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things." The implication, therefore, is that the historian should avoid Seeley's method and "go straight at the impersonal forces which rule the world, such as predestination, equality, divine right, secularism, congregationalism, nationality, and whatever other ruling ideas have grouped and propelled associations of men." This is Lord Acton's historic ideal.

In one sense Lord Acton has left no Obiter Dicta except in his letters, on the margins of his books, and in reported conversations. His "black boxes" contain, we are told, the systematized results of his readings: the substance and purport of each work he studied; the important moments in the development and ideas of great intellects; the material needed for the detailed scrutiny of great historical problems—notes voluminous, applicable and constantly applied to all the historical topics he treated. But in another and a very true sense, all of his utterances are Obiter Dicta. He wrote an enormous amount, but made no systematic presentation in extenso of his interpretation of history. His writings are scattered in fragmentary fashion over long periods of time; "carried on a little apart from the main. chain of durable literature," to use his own expression with regard to magazine articles; not synchronized or harmonized, lacking the force of unity, evoked by the call of the time. When his Cambridge Lectures are published, something will have

been done to reveal his maturest opinions upon modern history from the Reformation through the French Revolution.

It is too early to pronounce upon his rank and place among writers of history and public men. Measuring him by his own standard, one can only conjecture whether his influence in shaping historical thought and adding to historical knowledge will not be considered inferior to his influence in determining public policies and in moulding contemporary political and religious opinion. In both fields his action has been largely indirect. In politics and church affairs he was a champion of losing causes. In the sphere of history much depends upon the permanence of his influence in Cambridge and the ultimate effect upon historical studies produced by the Cambridge Modern History. His magnum opus, the History of Liberty, remained an aspiration.

Yale University.

OLIVER H. RICHARDSON.

THE UTILITY OF BEAUTY

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," is the rapturous utterance of a very young man. Only too soon do we discover that the "law of diminishing returns" is operative in the realm of the æsthetic and spiritual quite as surely, though more slowly, than in the realm of sensation. As with the drug the dose has to be increased, as in every sensational experience, if protracted, the stimulus has to become more emphatic or subtly penetrant, so we find that for sensitiveness to things spiritual and lovely, the appeal, if protracted or continuous, requires some sort of rebirth of us—the subject, some refreshment, dipping into the fount of youth—if our rapture, our ecstacy, nay, our pleasurable excitement, is to continue increasing or constant.

Relative novelty, then, must always remain an element of importance in our judgments, though we freely admit that the best test of things artistic is nevertheless: can they endure familiarity without a resulting indifference or contempt on our part? It is not that the old things are worse, but that our powers fail us, and that we need variety in the appeal, however willing we may be, to compel some measure of attention. How much more, if we desire to create a profound emotional interest? Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection" is not the morbid record of a merely personal degeneracy. Beauty, while it has undoubtedly its objective follies, if one might so say, is as a psychic experience dependent upon a certain resiliency and superabundance of spirit in us. "Joy is the beauty-making power" and "we in ourselves rejoice." Should we become disappointed with self and this fount of inner delight run dry, we shall, like Coleridge, "see, not feel how beautiful they are":- those clouds piling golden about the setting sun; those seas stretching before us cold to the dawn; those mountains reaching wistfully into the blue; those lovely valleys filled with idyllic hopes and delicious delicate eccentricities of coloring and form; those marvellous prayers in stone, the Gothic cathedrals; those quiet, serene, because self-controlled, perfections of the Greek sculptor; those epics and dramas that have fed the higher soul of our civilization for many centuries.

Now, is there any escape from this dying out in us of that experience which as we grow older we need more and more sorely? The adolescent have their world in them; they suffice unto themselves. Their eyes are closed save to their own reflections in the universal looking-glass. They do not seem to need God. They do not require the support of art. Only a few temperamentally melancholy, supersensitive, subtly unsocial seem to desire anything besides food and shelter and expenditure of energy, noisy companionship, and a circle of adoring elders. The hunger and thirst for righteousness does not become an ache until we have known sin. The yearning for beauty does not become a compelling passion until we have known ugliness. But right here we get a suggestion, offered us by the mother who lives her life over again in her daughter whom she is introducing to society; by the father who is making a place in the business world for his son. When we, on our own account, cease to respond to a stimulus, we can indirectly, through sympathy, obtain a reaction thereto in ourself, by imparting to another the experience of the joy we once had ourself. That is why I take my favorite book from the shelf most often when my friend is with me. I know what it contains; I know it is noble, lovely, exquisite, holy; I fear to discover that I am dull of sight, hard of hearing, and I leave the book unopened when alone.

So, to use theological language, "faith" leads to "works" because "works" preserve and restore "faith." The very selfpreservative instinct of "faith" impels the faithful to "works." It is after all then no altruistic impulse in us which makes us artist, preacher, proselytizer, teacher, special pleader for things divine.

In Browning's "Pauline," the gifted youth who refuses to embody his ideas in definite language because he prefers to admire his shifting day-dream world and adore himself as its creator, will suffer that decline of his image-making power so subtly analyzed by Browning later in the case of Sordello. He who refuses his endeavor to glorify his God by obtaining for him the praise of others, will sooner or later forfeit the bliss of worship which, to save himself from odious comparisons of present with

past and consequent despair, he shall have to secure somehow. Quite apart from any pride in creation, any ambitious longings for fame or fortune, every sincere lover of beauty sooner or later will find stirring in himself this missionary zeal. Hence, the enduring of poetic birth-pains, of hopes deferred, of remorse at failures, of shame incident to disparagement and misunderstanding, and all for the "cause": an ever fresh revelation to himself, in all her virgin loveliness, of Lady Beauty.

To obtain a definition of art is no easy matter, and the reason perhaps is that every artist sets forth from the particulars of his special art and therefore arrives at a conclusion insufficiently general to satisfy his brethren who worship Lady Beauty according to another rite. When Molière humorously presents us with a picture of that naif enfant terrible, his Bourgeois, crying out, "And when I say 'fetch my slippers,' is that prose? Have I been talking prose all my life without knowing it?" it is of course the pedantic rhetorician who is coming in for goodnatured criticism quite as much as the Bourgeois. Prose, if we mean by it an art-form, is not stumbled into by most of us. Το be natural is not always to be gracious, noble, or even interesting. The masters of prose are fewer in number than the masters of verse. Just because the rules of the technique of prose-expression are more unseizable and manifold, because the range is greater and the shadings more delicate, it would be less likely for a man to stumble into prose than into verse. Language having its daily, hourly utilities as a medium of haphazard human intercourse is one thing, and quite another thing is language seized upon by the holy spirit of man for the ennoblement of things expressed, for the enlargement of hearer and reader, to the vanishing of horizon limits, to the intensive realization of the life of the body and the soul. It is so with all other materials, not merely with language. But perhaps no art suffers as much as literary art by the confusion of terms. Cyclopædias are not literature. Newspaper writing very rarely makes even an effort to be literature. Most of the fiction devoured by the readers who have learned the three R's, but never served their apprenticeship, never applied for a novitiate, are mere panderings, mere pretenses-utilities that hardly rank with cabbage leaf tobacco,