Chapter IX (2)

The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently here upon a related though minor topic, is also the reason that it expresses more than its creator is aware of. In imaging life he includes more reality than he attends to; but if his representation has been made with truth, others may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. It is the mark of genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmentarily, but in the whole. So, in a scientific experiment, intended to illustrate one particular form of energy, a spectator versed in another science may detect some truth belonging in his own field. This richer significance of great works is especially found where the union of the general and the particular is strong; where the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In a sense he is more real than living men, and we can analyze his nature, have doubts about his motives, judge differently of his character, and value his temperament more or less as one might with a friend. The more imaginative a character is, in the sense that his personality and experience are given in the whole so that one feels the bottom of reality there, the more significance it has. Thus in the world of art discoveries beyond the intention of the writer may be made as in the actual world; so much of reality does it contain.

Will it be said that, in making primary the universal contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by this that I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession of truth. But if it be meant that abstract or moral instruction has been made the business of literature, the charge may be met with a disclaimer, as should be evident, first, from the emphasis placed on its concrete dealing with persons and actions. On the contrary, literature fails in art precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly such a teacher. Secondly, the life which literature organizes, the whole of human nature in its relation to the world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, the creative reason, grasps it in its totality. The moral aspect is but one among many that life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, humour, and terror; and in literature any one of these may be the prominent phase at the moment, for literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but all the reality of life. Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense of the word only in proportion as type and plot are distinctly separated from the truth they embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these are blended and unified. The fable is one of the most ancient forms of such didactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, and animals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has the touch of humour inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing at being men; but the very fact that the moral is of men and the tale is of beasts involves a separation of the truth from its concrete embodiment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. In the Oriental apologue an advance is made. The parables of our Lord, in particular, are admirable examples of its method. The characters are few, the situations common, the action simple, and the moral truth or lesson enforced is so completely clothed in the tale that it needs no explanation; at the same time, the mind is aware of the teacher. In the higher forms of literature, however, the fusion of ethics with life may be complete. Here the poet works so subtly that the mind is not aware of the illumination of this light which comes without the violence of the preacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect is wrought more through the sympathies than the reason. In such a case literature, though it conveys moral with other kinds of truth, is not open to the charge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and abstract. The educative power of literature, however, is not diminished because in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by its very definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it may teach, as has been said, what the poet never dreamed his work contained.

If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter of literature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and the particular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of type and plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered world for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in the same way as he knows nature in its living system--if this be so, what standing have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life? who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, and the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? They deny art, which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stopping short of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no other than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it what abstraction is to logic and induction to natural science,--the breath of its rational being. Those who hold to realism in its extreme form, as a representation of the actual only, behave as if one should say to the philosopher--leave this formulation of general notions and be content with sensible objects; or to the scientist--experiment no more, but observe the course of nature as it may chance to arise, and describe it in its succession. They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric of the reason. But there are no such realists; though pure realism has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is usually found mixed with ideal method; and as commonly employed the word designates the preference merely for types and plots of much detail, of narrow application, of little meaning, in opposition to the highly generalized and significant types and plots usually associated with the term idealism. In what way such realism has its place will also appear at a later stage. Here it is necessary to say no more than that in proportion as realism uses the ideal method only at the lowest, it narrows its appeal, weakens its power, and takes from literature her highest distinction by virtue of which she grasps the whole of character and fate in her creation and informs man of the secrets of his human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, and the end of all his spiritual effort and aspiration.

I am aware that I have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed until it finds this order; and in the progressive integration of its experience into an ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure to the intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous and extrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic work as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fully comprehends. Such works, we say, have form, which is just this interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this lower line of argument.

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common being in all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of communication between man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical difference in the experience and faculties to which all expression appeals for its intelligibility; neither could there be any system of life in social groups, or plan for education, unless such a common basis is accepted. The postulate of a common human nature is analogous to that of the unity of matter in science; it finds its complete expression in the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentally distinguished from race as was once thought, it is only as element is distinguished from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the postulate of an order obtaining in the soul, universal and necessary, independent of man's volition, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, is parallel with that of the constancy of physical law. A rational life expects this order. The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that of natural law, by experience; in the social world--the relations of men to one another--and in the more important region of our own nature we learn the issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world; in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the laws operant in our being, as well as those of the physical world. Literature assumes this order; in Aeschylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is this that gives their work interest. Apart from natural science, the whole authority of the past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon the permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known by man; that virtue makes men noble and vice renders them base, is a statement without meaning unless this order is continuous through ages; all principles of action, all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on this foundation.

So near is this order to us that it was known long before science came to any maturity. We have added, in truth, little to our knowledge of humanity since the Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before science, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near and vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, without Kepler's laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires first what is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, and his fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the later development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as well as our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to remember in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more and more what it is--a savage conception. But recognizing the great place of mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and morals. I find in this penetration of the order of the world within us our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world.

What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life outvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in conscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity. What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be learned in any of them--as an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,--it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,--is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. The course of action that increases life may be selected because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all.

Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in those relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest importance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, and only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary and permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together, exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act; his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge, the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.

These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's imagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should he preserved.

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts.

The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does not confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight--

"Virtue in her shape how lovely,"

which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doers aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed with their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her.

The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequately body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness; and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.

So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were little to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth.

What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external, independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form and is included in it.

The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thus in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these senses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the beauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is more intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm, whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with it as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue. The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion is the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other, and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new births of the spirit.

The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any radical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it the consequence that the will does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion dying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human figures where there is no thought of any other possession than the presence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphere of impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a common refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate unknown habits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new world only, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest of life. Why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus far appeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being than life itself?

The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the same time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be shown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in the various moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happens when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? It informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, when literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative; and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the life. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our hearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in their noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is the service which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us a scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into men's bosoms.

Two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically mentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And, secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such as has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no escape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is still our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in the poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--the pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But in passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathy and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in all things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means of universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules, as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.

Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously interpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upon darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, which similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain painless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance, and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in all tragic art.

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life; it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the difference between its created concrete and the original out of which that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice.