He is

feelings, that go to make up the internal man. alter et idem, another and the same, and only knows himself to be the same by the gentleman-usher, conscious Memory, that is continually introducing the fresh part of himself to the former, through all his changes. It will probably be the same at the last change on this side the grave. Consciousness on the other side will connect us by memory with this, whatever the changes, and there may be many, between this and our ultimate state of happiness.

The first change will be a casting off, not the body, for the germ of it will go with us, but the mass of bone and muscle, that is no more necessary for us after death than that same identical bone and muscle were necessary in childhood. That identical mass will be as consistently cast off at the grave as it has been grown into during the seven years that preceded it. Then we rise with what? A new body, into which the body-germ shall have gloriously expanded, and with which the soul will be as intimately bound. But this new body will not have the needments of the old, and, not requiring the daily renovation that the old did, the lusts and vices growing out of them will have dropped in the grave with the fleshly garment. And, with this fleshly garment, we shall have done, as far as being clad therein, but not as regards the memory thereof, which will probably cling to us, nor as to the experience won under that garb, which will go along with us, modifying, mellowing, and colouring our future career, however the consciousness of it will, through the ages, wax fainter and fainter, as the memory of childhood in the mature man, whose character, though past his power of tracing the influence, has taken stamp from that childhood.

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XXIII.

ON FUGITIVE PIECES.

VOLUME of fugitive pieces has this advantage over a long poem, that the reader may take it up, and read here and there, when he would be unequal to the sustained reading of the latter. The small pieces would, as far as they were read, be read in each case as a whole, and the long poem rarely reach, from the same class of readers, and of the same opportunity, more than piece-meal attention, with little regard to the order of the poet's design; passages would be separated, which were meant to be taken in connection, and parts, perhaps, read in immediate succession, which the poet had bestowed some pains in keeping asunder.

The advantage in this particular, therefore, is on the side of a collection of small poems, but, in another respect, such a volume is open to a very besetting peril, to avert which will tax the poet's sçavoir-faire to the utmost, and of a kind from which ordinary skill will deliver him in a more lengthened composition as regards his reader; the long-poem peril touching chiefly the nonreaders. The thing may be summed in a phrase; the long-poem difficulty is to find a reader who will give it consecutive perusal; the short-poem peril is to find him in the proper vein. Found the reader, the long poem has scope for skill in bringing him from the garish light at the threshold, by nice gradations, on and on, to the mystic and mellow radiance, where chief the poet's spell hath potency. In the short poem it is entrance and exit, no

sooner in than out; in which, therefore, what it hath of glamour had need operate strongly, and at once, for lack of space for gradual working.

This being so, let us go a little to the root of the matter. "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it.' The principle involved in this dictum expresses a necessity that underlies all art-work of whatever kind. Its observance, conscious or unconscious, is a condition of all success; and were it more present with art-workers, be they sculptors, painters, poets, musicians, or other, many a failure might have been averted, many a success still more complete and enduring. The continual besetment that is operating, often unconsciously, on the artist's mind, and especially in writing, in antagonism to this principle, is a tendency to impose his own specialty on others. And the besetment is the more difficult to shake off that it assumes to the artist's mind the specious form of originality. A very winning and coaxing way the phantom hath of passing herself off for the all-working goddess that is the soul of man's marvel-working. And the phantom comes to work so strongly in the end that the thing she calls herself is misprised in her presence by the victim of her blandishments; who, delivered over to her influence, has neither eyes nor ears for aught that hath not her stamp. And henceforth he and that other one, the daughter of truth, are strangers. Work on he may still, ay, and with vigour, under stimulus of the enchantress's cup, but all that he touches will be transmuted by her from what it is to what she shall choose it to seem. His art-work shall go forth, and be, indeed, unlike other men's, and so far he shall have his reward, and be original to the extent of copying none but himself; but, on the other hand, it shall have equally little relation to the broad, underlying Nature of which we are each but special expres

sions. This is the inevitable Nemesis that besets such choice.

The accepted expression for this phase of art-work is subjectivity, a term borrowed by the Germans from the scholastic philosophy. The error of subjectivity, however, to my mind, lies in the excess of the quality, where it reaches a predominance that, like Aaron's rod, it swallows up every other. Like other qualities and tendencies, it requires pruning, not excision. To attempt the latter were, in substance, aiming at a species of self-annihilation, of which there is only this cheerful thing to be said, that it is happily impossible. Never was art-work entirely discharged of the artist's subjectivity. Shakespeare and Homer, that show the least of it, so little that their works almost seem as if they were self-produced, for any patent indication of the manner of man that produced them, do yet give, negatively, undoubted glimpses of themselves. And, although they never step out from the radiant cloud of their works, never seemingly trace signs of themselves in the pictures of life and nature that they present us; yet, in their very dealing with the objects that must have formed their environment, something of choice transpires, which reveals something to the nice observer; even as Achilles, among the virgins at the court of Lycomedes, was discovered by his taking to the weapons from among the women's gear spread before them from the pedlar's pack by Ulysses. A large humanity, mellowed by a sweet melancholy, begotten or shapen by a marvellous worldcontact, seems to breathe through those divine dramas, differing, on one hand, from the narrow, but intense nature, and strong gloom that must have dictated the Commedia, and, on the other, from the large, but sunny and cheerful external-world-enjoying spirit, that created the Iliad, and had softened down by saddening experience in the Odyssey.

Something, therefore, of subjectivity is inseparable

from all art-work. It is the excess that is harmful, and it operates in alienating the sympathy of the reader, beholder, or other, to whom the art-work, be it statue, book, or picture, is addressed.

The prime aim of the

artist is to appeal to the sympathy by all legitimate means. That sympathy he must obtain, and it must form part of the effect he has to produce. Without it he is ob

for the blind, or To make people

viously in the position of painting lavishing sweet strains on the deaf. hear and see you must get them to listen and look. To do this the artist's work must have something in common with that which is in that other's mind at the time. If there be any thing wanting in that mind to put it in the requisite relation, it is the artist's business to supply it. In considering the possibility of that something being wanting in those he addresses by his work, and what that something may be, and how to supply it, and whether it can be supplied at all, the artist will often have to use much thought, and encounter much perplexity—a perplexity from which he cannot escape, as it will materially influence both his choice of a subject and the mode of handling it.

All art-work, and especially writing, would be much easier if the mere presentment of the artist's idea, as it springs from the brain, would in all cases suffice for its immediate, I will not say acceptance but recognition for what it is, and what belongs to it, in a word, that justice should be done to it. But it is not so. Except with ideas in common circulation, and therefore less needing to be individually expressed, the stronger the thinker, and the closer his observation, the less likely is what he propounds to be readily received, unless indeed it be tricked out with taking phraseology, which as with any other stranger, gets it admission for its fine clothes, where in a plain suit it would have been flouted or regarded with suspicion. And