Vice both in life and art begins with the self-conscious projection of this sense of propriety, even in the despising of itwith the discovery that "stolen waters are sweetest," and its evidence is the conscious suggestion of delight in a forbidden action. When society, owing to its very progress, needs to draw a veil around the soil where the manifold roots of its relations meet and unite in the central tie of sex, and when art actually uses this veil to suggest the more effectively to the fancy the grosser things of sense, then vice reigns in art, and only by superior cunning does it evade the police constable. It has set its lowest motive in opposition to its highest in violating those hallowed symbols which law has already been called in to protect; for surely the principle of beauty and the laws which all cultured nations alike have found needful to guard social purity, cannot be at variance, since both are forms of the impulse towards perfection. In the proper place we will instance some artists who have written immorally, and wronged society by personal disrespect of these symbols; while we shall cite others who have written of immoral phases of life faithfully, and yet have not done so. Meanwhile it may not be out of place to say a word or two about the deleterious element in later classical art, which we have already indicated, and which it is well to distinguish from the characteristics of earlier periods. That such an element exists is proved by several circumstances, but notably by the fact of a small but growing class having sprung up in Germany, who urge a modification in the hallowed usage of classical studies in the schools and even in the universities. To detect this false element will not only help us to a true conception of what is most healthy, because most natural in the ancients, but will also give us the key to those vices which the moderns have chiefly derived from later classical writers. If then we can discover the points where the selfconscious imagination, having lost the elements of simple belief in the great myths, began to play about them with purposeless grace, and to steep them in a highly artificial and alien, because strictly romantic, medium, we may not only re-establish the respect for antiquity, but

get substantial helps to aid us on our "dim and perilous way" through the rest of this article.

Shall we, then, wrong the great shades of Ovid and Virgil when we point at them the finger of rebuke? Truth compels us to speak plainly, that dishonor may not continue to be done to yet greater names. Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and Virgil's "Eneid" are, strictly speaking, not ancient, but modern; not classic, but romantic. The semblance of shame powerfully appears in classic fable for the first time in Dido and Æneas; and to it we trace the artificial play of motives and regards by which both human nature and spirit disappear in a sort of moonshine, and love and honor alike become mere sentiments. Having once struck root in European culture, this element, as we have said, ran through nearly all mediaval poetry, and different as were Boccaccio and Petrarch, it reached its climax in them. Even the great Dante sometimes walks in this unreal magic air, as he trustfully follows his great guide. Here and there in the Vita Nuova, as well as the episode of "Francesca da Rimini," we detect it; while it has formed an atmosphere into which nearly all later poets of note have occasionally wandered. It glimmers upon us from Shakespere's great play of the middle ages; it openly haunts us in much of Milton and Spenser; and sometimes it even breathes upon us, like an overheated atmosphere, from Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." There is no sense of reality about it: its vice is the vice of the artistic imagination, which is ever immoral. Perhaps of all English writers, Chaucer is the freest from it (for the "Knighte's Tale," which betrays it most, is an adaptation, if not a translation), and this simply because he was so healthy-so true to nature and to his own time. This statement, though it may seem somewhat inconsistent and confus

* Indeed, Tennyson's "Idylls" are only redeemed from immorality by the broad front which the poet throughout contrives to turn toward hi

own time. As he retires further into the mists of the medieval ages, he seems, sunlike, to reflect through the atmosphere of universal truth the warmer and more searching light upon modern tendencies. A semi-conscious instinct seems to

have guided Mr. Tennyson in his choice of subjects both from classic and Arthurian fable, and by this they interpret much that is difficult and perplexing in our daily modern life.

ing, we shall try to make good before we

have done.

The interjection of this false, artificial, and properly modern element into later classical literature was doubtless so subtle and imperceptible, that it is very difficult, in view of the whole field, to pronounce as to the point where it becomes positively impure; and hence there has been among certain Christian thinkers ever and anon a low tentative outcry against antiquity on the whole. And not altogether without reason. There is certainly a wide difference between Homer's open yet frankly veiled treatment of Zeus and Hera, in the fourteenth book of the "Iliad,”—which, too, redeems itself morally by its symbolic significance, and the unhealthy suggestive glimmer of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," or the self-conscious delight in acting against honor, which makes Virgil's picture of Dido and Eneas, in the fourth book of the "Eneid," degrading. Dr. Wehrmann of Stettin may be taken as representative of the Germans we have spoken of, and an article on the subject from his pen has recently been published. The burden of this ar ticle is that such use of ancient mythological forms and text-books, as is in general practice at present, has a tendency to awaken a distaste to Christianity. He holds that, used as means in the education of youth, these forms must have a very materialistic influence; and, what is perhaps a little more reasonable and more true, he argues that where they are adopted in modern art, the artist limits his appeal to a class. He is, perhaps, substantially nearer the main truth, however, when, after having quoted from August Böckh about the moral corruption that ultimately penetrated to the core of classic life, he confesses that

"Notwithstanding [all that has been said] that [classic] religion had a decided element of merit, to which St. Paul alluded when, preaching at Athens, he related the fact of his having found an altar, with the inscription To the Unknown God.' In declaring unto

them Him whom they ignorantly worshipped, he implied that they worshipped the true God, though in a dim uncertain way. From this point of view ancient mythology sets itself before us in a peculiar light, as a preparation and medium, through which man might pass to the truth of Christianity; and it proves itself to be so in conveying, on the one hand,

as it were, presentiments of truth, and on the other, in revealing its own defects, and, in its restless desire after completeness, pointing past itself to something which could supply them.

A certain longing and striving for reconciliation, a yearning for the one living God, and for peace with him, runs through the whole system of antiquity, and forms a preparation for the new relationship between God and man instituted by the work and suffering of our Lord Jesus."

This, we take it, is a statement of the truth, and Dr. Wehrmann's main error seems to us to lie in not definitively separating between what are undoubtedly embodiments of pure human nature, viewed through the healthy atmosphere of the early ages, and those which are the projection of the individual imagination playing about great symbols in an enervated artificial age, when they had wholly ceased to be believed in. This, it seems to us, is the more sound critical philosophy, as after careful inquiry and consideration we are satisfied that the most objectionable of the myths, if they existed, had not, in the Homeric age, taken the form in which they are now presented to us.

Thus we find that the main root of immorality in later art has been deference of forms which, though faithful to earlier phases of life, were directly opposed to the spirit of later periods. Such life as is gained in this way is for the most part galvanic and unhealthy. Essential opposition between spirit and form must be its characteristic mark, and this strife is such as does completely away with the soft self-enclosed calmness in which lies the seal of creation, even when the elements dealt with are of a totally different character. Shakespere, for instance, does not rave though Lear does so, because truth requires that he be at the same time faithful to the fool, who stands by grinning in his sorrow. But the sickli

ness, subjective dissatisfaction, and lifeweariness which a lower class of artists throw over their work, has for the most part proceeded, as we have seen, from a despising of the common elements around them-mediums and materials for crea tive power also-in a mad and wrongheaded deference to old forms. Throughout all such work there is a feverishness and morbid heat-alien wholly to the open healthfulness, which, though not seldom coarse, was never degrading by use of sly hints, clever double meanings, or cunning suggestions. In no period of literary history, perhaps, was there more of this falseness than in that of the Medici, when a Pulci was il Prima Poeta. A la tent skepticism lay in all art, and classic forms were enthroned on the caput mortuum of Christian faith, which yet the common crowd, wiser than their teachers, clung to and lived by. The most sacred objects of the common faith were deemed fit play-balls for the fancy, and nature was rigorously limited by the order of the court. Scientific men tell us that the storm which spends itself wrathfully along our coasts, strewing them with wrecks, may have taken its rise in Indian seas, and, traveling westward, may be traced in its eccentric course. So is it with literary influences like these. The wave of skepticism generated chiefly by the ultra-classical devotion of those times, when the mediaval excesses continued to exist without any of the medieval reverence and faith, did not spend itself till in the beginning of the nineteenth century it had thrown up upon our coast a stormy, wailing Byron. Byron busily formed himself upon the Italian writers of the decadence, and he did not live long enough to shake himself free from their subtle influences: the consequence is that in his highest flights he is often most daringly immoral. And his

It is perhaps worthy of remark that the first impulse derived from those artists who are supremely healthy is not towards the production of art: they do not excite to imitation, in fact. The impulse is rather towards activity in the real world: they give zest to life, and excite a hunger for deeds. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespere, Scott, and Goethe (save, indeed, in the Wertherial stuff which Goethe soon came to see the falseness of, and to renounce) administer what Emerson would call "healthy shocks towards practical effort." Mr. Tennyson has, perhaps, a glimpse of this,

immorality does not arise from expressions here and there, but from his pervading spirit of scorn and revolt, which was not only in the highest sense unpoetical, but unpoetical because it was at bottom egotistic, bitter and unjust. The lowest elements in Byron become an amalgam under-running all his poetry; and when we say that he was pre-eminently an egotist, and that an egotist can never be a great creator, we say the worst that it is needful to say of him. But in our own day Mr. Swinburne implicitly justifies himself by reference to Byron's sins against morality, and we are led by a not unnatural association to refer to him before passing on.

Mr. Swinburne, as we shall see hereafter, violates each of the three laws laid down; but as all his sins trace their roots more or less directly to a revolt against what is admittedly good and earnestly believed, in his own time, we may consistently enough say a few words of him here. In the measure that the artist exhibits traces of a conscious reaction against those moral forms-mediums of restriction for individual caprice or de sire, by which society seeks to develop the higher by circumscribing the lower

he only betrays individual limitation, and determinately and of set purpose indicates by each new effort certain partialities or tendencies towards special phases of life and character. But the essence of art, as we have seen, is the suspension of such partialities and preferenthough his exceedingly metaphysical modes of conception war against his giving it the fullest ef

The last lesson of "Locksley Hall and Mand," if it be admitted that they have any lesson, is certainly towards renunciation of the specially artistic tastes to find fullness of life in un

ion with common men for common ends. But the highest thing Mr. Tennyson has written in this as in other respects is the Northern Farmer," where the simple naturalness of the picture, in showing us how, to a character originally coarse and sensual, mere devotion to honest work has ministered something of nobility, does far more in directing our impulses than the finest preaching. The question may therefore be raised whether we have not in this a test of the highest Goethe says two things of Shakespere which we think have a bearing here: (1) that the first glance he cast into the world of Shakespere impelled him with hasty strides to the real world, to mingle in the flood of destiny that courses through it; and (2) that had he read Shakespere before commencing to write dramas, he felt he should never have made a beginning.

art.

ces, that justice may be done to all alike. Sameness in the characters dealt with, and in the atmosphere with which they are surrounded, and that whether the characters be conventionally good or bad, and whether the atmosphere be healthy or unhealthy, must mean, if it means anything, a narrowness of sympathy in which lies the essence of injustice. Its first characteristic is that it cannot be impartial. It has scent for only one blood, and passes all other tracks that may lie in its way. And the of fence is, of course, all the worse when the proclivity is to morbid moods and experiences. The work of such a one, so far as it is real, belongs to the same class as a police report; so far as it is ideal, he has only produced what Hegel takes such care to condemn-a false ideal which is indulged by the isolated imagination, and belongs in no sense to humanity. Such were the real pictures—the naturepictures of Rousseau; such too were his ideals, those, for instance, which he wrought out in "Pygmalion," and the "Fragments d'Iphis." Productions like these wholly want that seal of unconscious and healthy variety which is inseparable from the work of true genius. They all tend to run into mere analysis, and mostly morbid analysis. This, however, belongs not to art but to science, and while it may have value as a series of psychological studies, it has none whatever as creation. Mr. Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" fall to be condemned under all the forms in which this law will state itself. First, in the morbid self-conscious ness which pervades them. Secondly (which strictly follows from the former), in their absolute want of true variety and dramatic freedom of movement-that is, a movement determined by the interchange of characters and circumstances so different from each other that the real unity is built out of a non-apparent unity; which, however, Mr. Swinburne's poems reverse, their unity being an outward and conventional one. Thirdly, by the bold and declared attack upon ideas or forms which the common sense of the mass holds to be hallowed. Neither Professor Morley's clever special pleading, nor Mr. Swinburne's own rhodomontade, can save these poems from the condemnation of the healthy instinct; and this not because

of pruriency on the reader's part, but because of the unnatural and oppressive atmosphere into which we are thrown-an atmosphere as of a laboratory or a dissecting-room. We can continue to live with one such establishment in a street or in a town; if there were a whole street or a town of them, it would kill us even to pass through it. And so with books. There is only one Ophelia in Hamlet; only one Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales. We have a funny hardgrained grave-digger beside the one, an Emilie and a nun alongside the other. What saves the genuine artist from falling to the low level of Mr. Swinburne is his instinctive perception that in life nothing stands by itself or exists for itself, and hence he never surrounds his characters with an atmosphere whose uniformity unmistakably proves its subjective root. With such a one each character carries his own atmosphere with him, moves freely in his own orbit, which is felt to be as foreign to the poet himself as to the rest of his characters. Hence the sharp, clear healthy determinateness of each detail in the picture, even when traits or actions, in themselves immoral, are dealt with; and hence the honest plainness with which the true artist always treats what in itself is coarse.

He

We confess we looked forward with interest to reading Mr. Swinburne's pamphlet, and expected an ingenious defence: the reader may imagine our surprise when we found Mr. Swinburne still more effectively closing the door against himself, and justifying by implication the verdict which the mass of critics have given, though it may not in all cases have been based on sound principles. condemns himself more severely than we could do under the above law in trying to justify himself by precedents. He is even more unlucky in his precedents than in his arguments. Byron and Shelley were poets in spite of their conscious revolt against "what was best and highest in society," and not because of it; for certainly such revolt lowers them in rank as artists, however large the crowds they may have set agog as agitating quacks do. "Queen Mab" is more a pamphlet than a poem, and Shelley lived to see and feel this; while much in "Don Juan" must rank the same.

But we may be met by two questions here. The first is this," May not these productions which you so strongly condemn have the more historic value the more individual they are?" We admit the pertinence of the question, and will pause for a moment to answer it. Since no mere personal feelings or tendencies can exhaust the character of any given period, art will only have historic value as the desires and habits specially individual in their character have been passed out of view: for in the measure in which they obtrusively appear, the work as a record is personal and false; in other words, is not art at all, but autobiography.* We have said that the revealing of partiality is a direct confession of limitation. Even satire-that form of art which would seem to owe most to personal regards-becomes historically valuable in the very degree individual tendencies. have been thrust out of sight. And there

are two reasons for this: (1) when the satirist only reveals one tendency of his time to condemn another, he is certain to have had some selfish object to serve, and not being disinterested, he falls even below the level of his time; and (2) because such tendencies conclusively show want of power to deal with the nobler elements of life-the only ground from which true satire can be written; for Goethe has wisely said that the best way to elevate men is to paint them as though they were almost what you wished them to be. Jean Paul Richter's satire, as well as that of Cervantes, is true to this requirement, having historical value through its form, universal significance through its spirit. Defoe in parts, and Horace throughout, belong to the higher class, though they have not so completely dissolved their individuality in the universal, or, in other words, show more of personal prejudice. Lord Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is an excellent specimen of the individual type, which, through its intense individuality, has lost all value; while Boccaccio and

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Perhaps no work has more historic value than Shakespere's plays. As a reflection of his age it is perfect; and yet are we not constantly hearing complaints of the little of the man there is in it? The same thing holds of the dramas of Eschylus and Sophocles, and of the novels of Scott.

NEW SERIES-Vol. VI., No. 2.

Pope as satirists, to a large degree, must take place with Byron.

The other question is this,-"Do you not by so rigidly insisting on compliance with this law of Truth render impossible all artistic treatment of other periods?" We answer, by no means. We only lay down the conditions under which alone this can be faithfully accomplished. Here, as elsewhere, our first duty is to that which lies nearest us. The artist, even if he would, cannot rise out of the atmosphere of his own time; it is the medium through which he must view the life of other periods, if he would view it truly. Not that he ought to seek to make it teach conscious lessons. Something higher than that is required of him. He will never read other periods rightly till he has got into complete sympathy with the inmost life of his own.*

* Thus all formal imitation of old writers, especially in those portions where they reach nighest to the white heights of dramatic truth, is excluded. It may thus be a question whether Pope, in trying to modernize the "Wife of Bath," was not doing a piece of immoral work, since (1) it was a necessity of the more refined and cultivat d speech that where Chaucer plainly spoke to the sense, he shou d suggest to the fancy, always the more dangerous process; and (2) because he could only have become moral as he rendered the whole of Chaucer in the spirit of Chaucer; and this he could not do, his sympathies with life being deficient. It may be quite moral to create, what it is grossly immoral to imitate. Only Chaucer can render Chaucer; for his characters are not seen truly when seen alone, but only in their relation to each other. Thus the "Canterbury Pilg image" becomes a whole-a work of art in which lies all the mystery and varied movement of a world. For creation is vital, all the parts being interdependent, as having risen simultaneously in one moment of supremest feedom; imitation separates parts and opposes them to each other, and its essence is bondage to the letter. Two of Mr. Swinburne's mo-t labored pieces must, we fear, be proscribed on this ground (“Anactoria," and "The Two Dreams.") With all the field of classic and mediæval literature before him, Mr. Swinburne has seized on the very portions of Sappho and Boccaccio which are most opposed to the spirit of our time; and he has wrought them out, not in the temper which ought to govern an artist of to-day, but rather in that of a vicious oldworld pedant. There is an excessive sickliness and morbid heat about them to which we find no relief in any of the poems accompanying them. Even admitting that truth to his models required this, we know that such elements did not exhaust the humanity of these periods any more than they do ours; and therefore truth to our time imperatively requires some such relief. It is on grounds like these that we would justify our decision as to

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