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Essays and Lectures

by Oscar Wilde

January, 1997  [Etext #774]


The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde
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Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde
Scanned and proofed by David Price, [e-mail]





Essays and Lectures




Contents

The Rise of Historical Criticism
The English Renaissance of Art
House Decoration
Art and the Handicraftman
Lecture to Art Students
London Models
Poems in Prose




THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM




CHAPTER I



HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the
civilisation or literature of any people.  It is part of that
complex working towards freedom which may be described as the
revolt against authority.  It is merely one facet of that
speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action
produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the
parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a
factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains,
as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by
which it works.

Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is
not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms
of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt.  The clay
cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the
pyramids, form not history but the material for history.

The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest
life of the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a
freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the
writings of any people; but the protective spirit which is the
characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature
as to their commerce.  Free criticism is as unknown as free trade.
While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logical
mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy than
to history or chronology.  Indeed, in history their imagination
seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingled
together that any attempt to separate them seems vain.  If we
except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian
Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth
of their writings or examine their method of investigation.

It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that
history proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical
criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans,
whom we call by the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well
said, we owe all that moves in the world except the blind forces of
nature.

For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and
journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of
their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of
historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or
illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the
Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.C.

L'ESPRIT D'UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS E JOUR FIXE, and
the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first
man.  It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its
intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physical science the
alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception
of an essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of
phenomena.  It appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind
than as a principle of research, and its earliest influences are to
be found in the sacred writings.

For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in
matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the
spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development,
it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining
whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the
investigation into the causes of events, the general relations
which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate
development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of
history.

Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two
spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially
manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so
different, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the
motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for
a clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we should
consider these two questions entirely apart from one another.  I
shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their
chronological order as representing the rational order - not that
the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives
its advance.  In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of
stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual
development, not merely in the question of historical criticism,
but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so
essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external
influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the
footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order
sanctioned by reason.



CHAPTER II



AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks
reached that critical point in the history of every civilised
nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when
the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the
lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men
find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the
old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.

From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a
mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove
to hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to
mar by imputed wickedness the perfection of God's nature - a very
shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped
annihilation.  Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales,
and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical
science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the
spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek
mythology was chiefly open to attack.

It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man
will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he
worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown
in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the
evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told
of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders
of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as
clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of
Dante.

Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom,
found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the
doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.

To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls
of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden
certain moral and physical truths.  The contest between Athena and
Ares was that eternal contest between rational thought and the
brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of
the 'Far Darter' were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot
from the golden bow of the child of God, but the common rays of the
sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inert mass of burning
metal.

Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis,
has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn.
There were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric
power.

Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings
must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it
was essentially unscientific.  Its inherent weakness is clearly
pointed out by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no
doubt explain many of the current legends, yet, if it is to be
appealed to at all, it must be as a universal principle; a position
he is by no means prepared to admit.

Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples,
and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was
analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp
representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion.

Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred
writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too
much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of
attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down
certain ethical canons of historical criticism.  God is good; God
is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men.
These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the
Greek religion.

'God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent
cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to
mourn for the death of any well-beloved son.  Away with the tears
for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of
the broken covenant!'  (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388,
391.)

Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of
the days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is
rescued from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage
which may be recited as the earliest instance of that 'whitewashing
of great men,' as it has been called, which is so popular in our
own day, when Catiline and Clodius are represented as honest and
far-seeing politicians, when EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed
for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from his heritage of infamy as an
accomplished DILETTANTE whose moral aberrations are more than
excused by his exquisite artistic sense and charming tenor voice.

But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the
ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which
may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of
Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.

Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a
column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on
earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and
heroes of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose
achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,'
and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the
treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to
present the plausible residuum as actual truth.

To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical
sons of the storm, strange links between the lives of men and
animals, were merely some youths from the village of Nephele in
Thessaly, distinguished for their sporting tastes; the 'living
harvest of panoplied knights,' which sprang so mystically from the
dragon's teeth, a body of mercenary troops supported by the profits
on a successful speculation in ivory; and Actaeon, an ordinary
master of hounds, who, living before the days of subscription, was
eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his kennel.

Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of
historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely
probable by the modern investigations into the workings of the
mythopoeic spirit in post-Christian times.  Charlemagne and Roland,
St. Francis and William Tell, are none the less real personages
because their histories are filled with much that is fictitious and
incredible, but in all cases what is essentially necessary is some
external corroboration, such as is afforded by the mention of
Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of England, or (in the
sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of Hissarlik.  But to
rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural elements,
and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is,
as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of
investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.

And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and
Polybius, that pure invention on Homer's part is inconceivable, we
may without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow
gradually, and are not formed in a day.  But between a poet's
deliberate creation and historical accuracy there is a wide field
of the mythopoeic faculty.

This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially
philosophical and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to
whom it was introduced by the poet Ennius, that pioneer of
cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone
of ancient thought on the question of the treatment of mythology
till the rise of Christianity, when it was turned by such writers
as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack
on Paganism.  It was then abandoned by all those who still bent the
knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by the
philosophic mystics of Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of
interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities
of Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God.  In
what vain defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the
Pantheon can best tell us.

Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved,
and the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the
purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the
southern parts of Europe in our own day.  The old fable that the
Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names
has more truth in it than the many care to discover.

Having now traced the progress of historical criticism in the
special treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to
investigate the form in which the same spirit manifested itself as
regards what one may term secular history and secular historians.
The field traversed will be found to be in some respects the same,
but the mental attitude, the spirit, the motive of investigation
are all changed.

There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before
Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of
history, for in him we discover not merely the empirical connection
of cause and effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is
the characteristic of the historian proper.

For all history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of
comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through
the universality of the principles employed.  And the great
conceptions which unify the work of Herodotus are such as even
modern thought has not yet rejected.  The immediate government of
the world by God, the nemesis and punishment which sin and pride
invariably bring with them, the revealing of God's purpose to His
people by signs and omens, by miracles and by prophecy; these are
to Herodotus the laws which govern the phenomena of history.  He is
essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes are ever
strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of the
waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient
causes.

Yet we can discern in him the rise of that HISTORIC SENSE which is
the rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, the
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], to use the words of a
Greek writer, as opposed to that which comes either [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced].

He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse
of the sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while
accepting the supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of
rationalism, he is essentially inconsistent.  For the better
apprehension of the character of this historic sense in Herodotus
it will be necessary to examine at some length the various forms of
criticism in which it manifests itself.

Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed
men, of the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men
who slept six months in the year ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]), of the wer-wolf of the Neuri, and the like, are
entirely rejected by him as being opposed to the ordinary
experience of life, and to those natural laws whose universal
influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already made
known to the world of thought.  Other legends, such as the suckling
of Cyrus by a bitch, or the feather-rain of northern Europe, are
rationalised and explained into a woman's name and a fall of snow.
The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of
Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the
more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the
Massagetae from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their
country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original
possessors.

But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on
from points like these to those questions of general probability,
the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality
of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions
which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must
be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are
essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they
cannot, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but
appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on the experience of
life.  Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts
of law are purely stationary, while the science of historical
probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the
advancing spirit of each age.

Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is
more important than that which rests on psychological probability.

Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the
presence of Helen within the walls of Troy.  Had she been there, he
says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they
and their children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and
as regards the authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his
poem show that he knew of Helen's sojourn in Egypt during the
siege, but selected the other story as being a more suitable motive
for an epic.  Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae
family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to
Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever
have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of
Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on the city.  A
shield, he acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly
have been done by such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon;
nor will he believe that a great king like Rhampsinitus would have
sent his daughter [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of
probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been
rich enough to build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological
grounds the story is impossible (ii. 134).

In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the
forcible entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god's
mother, which seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight
where sticks were freely used ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]), 'I feel sure,' he says, 'that many of them died from
getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the assertions of the
Egyptian priests to the contrary.'  There is also something
charmingly naive in the account he gives of the celebrated Greek
swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his
countrymen warning of the Persian advance.  'If, however,' he says,
'I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in
a boat.'

There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the
instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands
on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note
even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and
sceptical spirit of inquiry.

How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown
by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic
tests to matters connected with religion.  He nowhere, indeed,
grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek
Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous
achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express
grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so
was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]).

Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems
to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage
(ii. 45) concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for
having gone so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of
course, that in which he rejects the mythical account of the
foundation of Dodona.  'How can a dove speak with a human voice?'
he asks, and rationalises the bird into a foreign princess.

Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at
the beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric
causes, and not in consequence of the incantations of the MAGIANS.
He calls Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an
inspired prophet, 'a clever man who had acquired for himself the
art of prophecy'; and as regards the miracle told of the AEginetan
statues of the primeval deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they
fell on their knees when the sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry
them off, 'any one may believe it,' he says, 'who likes, but as for
myself, I place no credence in the tale.'

So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism,
as far as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and
philosophic writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his
position we must also note how conscious he was of the value of
documentary evidence, of the use of inscriptions, of the importance
of the poets as throwing light on manners and customs as well as on
historical incidents.  No writer of any age has more vividly
recognised the fact that history is a matter of evidence, and that
it is as necessary for the historian to state his authority as it
is to produce one's witnesses in a court of law.

While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic
sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances
where he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary
forces of life.  Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the
development of history, he appears almost like a mediaeval writer
matched with a modern rationalist.  For, contemporary though they
were, between these two authors there is an infinite chasm of
thought.

The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated
from those passages where they treat of the same subject.  The
execution of the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during
the Peloponnesian War is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most
supernatural instances of the workings of nemesis and the wrath of
an outraged hero; while the lengthened siege and ultimate fall of
Troy was brought about by the avenging hand of God desiring to
manifest unto men the mighty penalties which always follow upon
mighty sins.  But Thucydides either sees not, or desires not to
see, in either of these events the finger of Providence, or the
punishment of wicked doers.  The death of the heralds is merely an
Athenian retaliation for similar outrages committed by the opposite
side; the long agony of the ten years' siege is due merely to the
want of a good commissariat in the Greek army; while the fall of
the city is the result of a united military attack consequent on a
good supply of provisions.

Now, it is to be observed that in this latter passage, as well as
elsewhere, Thucydides is in no sense of the word a sceptic as
regards his attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends.

Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Minos, about
whom Herodotus has some doubts, are to him as real personages as
Alcibiades or Gylippus.  The points in his historical criticism of
the past are, first, his rejection of all extra-natural
interference, and, secondly, the attributing to these ancient
heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day.  The
present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it
was to the prediction of the future.

Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one
with modern science.  We too know that, just as the primeval coal-
beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric
phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the
history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed
whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us.  To
lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation
of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years,
is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to intermingle preternatural
in geological theories.

Whatever the canons of art may be, no difficulty in history is so
great as to warrant the introduction of a spirit of spirit [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], in the sense of a violation of
the laws of nature.

Upon the other point, however, Thucydides falls into an
anachronism.  To refuse to allow the workings of chivalrous and
self-denying motives among the knights of the Trojan crusade,
because he saw none in the faction-loving Athenian of his own day,
is to show an entire ignorance of the various characteristics of
human nature developing under different circumstances, and to deny
to a primitive chieftain like Agamemnon that authority founded on
opinion, to which we give the name of divine right, is to fall into
an historical error quite as gross as attributing to Atreus the
courting of the populace ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced])
with a view to the Mycenean throne.

The general method of historical criticism pursued by Thucydides
having been thus indicated, it remains to proceed more into detail
as regards those particular points where he claims for himself a
more rational method of estimating evidence than either the public
or his predecessors possessed.

'So little pains,' he remarks, 'do the vulgar take in the
investigation of truth, satisfied with their preconceived
opinions,' that the majority of the Greeks believe in a Pitanate
cohort of the Spartan army and in a double vote being the
prerogative of the Spartan kings, neither of which opinions has any
foundation in fact.  But the chief point on which he lays stress as
evincing the 'uncritical way with which men receive legends, even
the legends of their own country,' is the entire baselessness of
the common Athenian tradition in which Harmodios and Aristogeiton
were represented as the patriotic liberators of Athens from the
Peisistratid tyranny.  So far, he points out, from the love of
freedom being their motive, both of them were influenced by merely
personal considerations, Aristogeiton being jealous of Hipparchos'
attention to Harmodios, then a beautiful boy in the flower of Greek
loveliness, while the latter's indignation was aroused by an insult
offered to his sister by the prince.

Their motives, then, were personal revenge, while the result of
their conspiracy served only to rivet more tightly the chains of
servitude which bound Athens to the Peisistratid house, for
Hipparchos, whom they killed, was only the tyrant's younger
brother, and not the tyrant himself.

To prove his theory that Hippias was the elder, he appeals to the
evidence afforded by a public inscription in which his name occurs
immediately after that of his father, a point which he thinks shows
that he was the eldest, and so the heir.  This view he further
corroborates by another inscription, on the altar of Apollo, which
mentions the children of Hippias and not those of his brothers;
'for it was natural for the eldest to be married first'; and
besides this, on the score of general probability he points out
that, had Hippias been the younger, he would not have so easily
obtained the tyranny on the death of Hipparchos.

Now, what is important in Thucydides, as evinced in the treatment
of legend generally, is not the results he arrived at, but the
method by which he works.  The first great rationalistic historian,
he may be said to have paved the way for all those who followed
after him, though it must always be remembered that, while the
total absence in his pages of all the mystical paraphernalia of the
supernatural theory of life is an advance in the progress of
rationalism, and an era in scientific history, whose importance
could never be over-estimated, yet we find along with it a total
absence of any mention of those various social and economical
forces which form such important factors in the evolution of the
world, and to which Herodotus rightly gave great prominence in his
immortal work.  The history of Thucydides is essentially one-sided
and incomplete.  The intricate details of sieges and battles,
subjects with which the historian proper has really nothing to do
except so far as they may throw light on the spirit of the age, we
would readily exchange for some notice of the condition of private
society in Athens, or the influence and position of women.

There is an advance in the method of historical criticism; there is
an advance in the conception and motive of history itself; for in
Thucydides we may discern that natural reaction against the
intrusion of didactic and theological considerations into the
sphere of the pure intellect, the spirit of which may be found in
the Euripidean treatment of tragedy and the later schools of art,
as well as in the Platonic conception of science.

History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just
as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth.
But, to set before either the painter or the historian the
inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued,
is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art
and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in
the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress:
IL NE FAUT DEMANDER DE L'ART QUE L'ART, DU PASSE QUE LE PASSE.

Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and
the nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of
the truth that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a
moral aim.  Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to
prove.  He analyses the results which follow inevitably from
certain antecedents, in order that on a recurrence of the same
crisis men may know how to act.

His object was to discover the laws of the past so as to serve as a
light to illumine the future.  We must not confuse the recognition
of the utility of history with any ideas of a didactic aim.  Two
points more in Thucydides remain for our consideration:  his
treatment of the rise of Greek civilisation, and of the primitive
condition of Hellas, as well as the question how far can he be said
really to have recognised the existence of laws regulating the
complex phenomena of life.



CHAPTER III



THE investigation into the two great problems of the origin of
society and the philosophy of history occupies such an important
position in the evolution of Greek thought that, to obtain any
clear view of the workings of the critical spirit, it will be
necessary to trace at some length their rise and scientific
development as evinced not merely in the works of historians
proper, but also in the philosophical treatises of Plato and
Aristotle.  The important position which these two great thinkers
occupy in the progress of historical criticism can hardly be over-
estimated.  I do not mean merely as regards their treatment of the
Greek Bible, and Plato's endeavours to purge sacred history of its
immorality by the application of ethical canons at the time when
Aristotle was beginning to undermine the basis of miracles by his
scientific conception of law, but with reference to these two wider
questions of the rise of civil institutions and the philosophy of
history.

And first, as regards the current theories of the primitive
condition of society, there was a wide divergence of opinion in
Hellenic society, just as there is now.  For while the majority of
the orthodox public, of whom Hesiod may be taken as the
representative, looked back, as a great many of our own day still
do, to a fabulous age of innocent happiness, a BELL' ETE DELL'
AURO, where sin and death were unknown and men and women were like
Gods, the foremost men of intellect such as Aristotle and Plato,
AEschylus and many of the other poets (1) saw in primitive man 'a
few small sparks of humanity preserved on the tops of mountains
after some deluge,' 'without an idea of cities, governments or
legislation,' 'living the lives of wild beasts in sunless caves,'
'their only law being the survival of the fittest.'

And this, too, was the opinion of Thucydides, whose ARCHAEOLOGIA as
it is contains a most valuable disquisition on the early condition
of Hellas, which it will be necessary to examine at some length.

Now, as regards the means employed generally by Thucydides for the
elucidation of ancient history, I have already pointed out how
that, while acknowledging that 'it is the tendency of every poet to
exaggerate, as it is of every chronicler to seek to be attractive
at the expense of truth; he yet assumes in the thoroughly
euhemeristic way, that under the veil of myth and legend there does
yet exist a rational basis of fact discoverable by the method of
rejecting all supernatural interference as well as any
extraordinary motives influencing the actors.  It is in complete
accordance with this spirit that he appeals, for instance, to the
Homeric epithet of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as
applied to Corinth, as a proof of the early commercial prosperity
of that city; to the fact of the generic name HELLENES not
occurring in the ILIAD as a corroboration of his theory of the
essentially disunited character of the primitive Greek tribes; and
he argues from the line 'O'er many islands and all Argos ruled,' as
applied to Agamemnon, that his forces must have been partially
naval, 'for Agamemnon's was a continental power, and he could not
have been master of any but the adjacent islands, and these would
not be many but through the possession of a fleet.'

Anticipating in some measure the comparative method of research, he
argues from the fact of the more barbarous Greek tribes, such as
the AEtolians and Acarnanians, still carrying arms in his own day,
that this custom was the case originally over the whole country.
'The fact,' he says, 'that the people in these parts of Hellas are
still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of
life was equally common to all.'  Similarly, in another passage, he
shows how a corroboration of his theory of the respectable
character of piracy in ancient days is afforded by 'the honour with
which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a
successful marauder,' as well as by the fact that the question,
'Are you a pirate?' is a common feature of primitive society as
shown in the poets; and finally, after observing how the old Greek
custom of wearing belts in gymnastic contests still survived among
the more uncivilised Asiatic tribes, he observes that there are
many other points in which a likeness may be shown between the life
of the primitive Hellenes and that of the barbarians to-day.'

As regards the evidence afforded by ancient remains, while adducing
as a proof of the insecure character of early Greek society the
fact of their cities (2) being always built at some distance from
the sea, yet he is careful to warn us, and the caution ought to be
borne in mind by all archaeologists, that we have no right to
conclude from the scanty remains of any city that its legendary
greatness in primitive times was a mere exaggeration.  'We are not
justified,' he says, 'in rejecting the tradition of the magnitude
of the Trojan armament, because Mycenae and the other towns of that
age seem to us small and insignificant.  For, if Lacedaemon was to
become desolate, any antiquarian judging merely from its ruins
would be inclined to regard the tale of the Spartan hegemony as an
idle myth; for the city is a mere collection of villages after the
old fashion of Hellas, and has none of those splendid public
buildings and temples which characterise Athens, and whose remains,
in the case of the latter city, would be so marvellous as to lead
the superficial observer into an exaggerated estimate of the
Athenian power.'  Nothing can be more scientific than the
archaeological canons laid down, whose truth is strikingly
illustrated to any one who has compared the waste fields of the
Eurotas plain with the lordly monuments of the Athenian acropolis.
(3)

On the other hand, Thucydides is quite conscious of the value of
the positive evidence afforded by archaeological remains.  He
appeals, for instance, to the character of the armour found in the
Delian tombs and the peculiar mode of sepulture, as corroboration
of his theory of the predominance of the Carian element among the
primitive islanders, and to the concentration of all the temples
either in the Acropolis, or in its immediate vicinity, to the name
of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] by which it was still
known, and to the extraordinary sanctity of the spring of water
there, as proof that the primitive city was originally confined to
the citadel, and the district immediately beneath it (ii. 16).  And
lastly, in the very opening of his history, anticipating one of the
most scientific of modern methods, he points out how in early
states of civilisation immense fertility of the soil tends to
favour the personal aggrandisement of individuals, and so to stop
the normal progress of the country through 'the rise of factions,
that endless source of ruin'; and also by the allurements it offers
to a foreign invader, to necessitate a continual change of
population, one immigration following on another.  He exemplifies
his theory by pointing to the endless political revolutions that
characterised Arcadia, Thessaly and Boeotia, the three richest
spots in Greece, as well as by the negative instance of the
undisturbed state in primitive time of Attica, which was always
remarkable for the dryness and poverty of its soil.

Now, while undoubtedly in these passages we may recognise the first
anticipation of many of the most modern principles of research, we
must remember how essentially limited is the range of the
ARCHAEOLOGIA, and how no theory at all is offered on the wider
questions of the general conditions of the rise and progress of
humanity, a problem which is first scientifically discussed in the
REPUBLIC of Plato.

And at the outset it must be premised that, while the study of
primitive man is an essentially inductive science, resting rather
on the accumulation of evidence than on speculation, among the
Greeks it was prosecuted rather on deductive principles.
Thucydides did, indeed, avail himself of the opportunities afforded
by the unequal development of civilisation in his own day in
Greece, and in the places I have pointed out seems to have
anticipated the comparative method.  But we do not find later
writers availing themselves of the wonderfully accurate and
picturesque accounts given by Herodotus of the customs of savage
tribes.  To take one instance, which bears a good deal on modern
questions, we find in the works of this great traveller the gradual
and progressive steps in the development of the family life clearly
manifested in the mere gregarious herding together of the
Agathyrsi, their primitive kinsmanship through women in common, and
the rise of a feeling of paternity from a state of polyandry.  This
tribe stood at that time on that borderland between umbilical
relationship and the family which has been such a difficult point
for modern anthropologists to find.

The ancient authors, however, are unanimous in insisting that the
family is the ultimate unit of society, though, as I have said, an
inductive study of primitive races, or even the accounts given of
them by Herodotus, would have shown them that the [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced] of a personal household, to use Plato's
expression, is really a most complex notion appearing always in a
late stage of civilisation, along with recognition of private
property and the rights of individualism.

Philology also, which in the hands of modern investigators has
proved such a splendid instrument of research, was in ancient days
studied on principles too unscientific to be of much use.
Herodotus points out that the word ERIDANOS is essentially Greek in
character, that consequently the river supposed to run round the
world is probably a mere Greek invention.  His remarks, however, on
language generally, as in the case of PIROMIS and the ending of the
Persian names, show on what unsound basis his knowledge of language
rested.

In the BACCHAE of Euripides there is an extremely interesting
passage in which the immoral stories of the Greek mythology are
accounted for on the principle of that misunderstanding of words
and metaphors to which modern science has given the name of a
disease of language.  In answer to the impious rationalism of
Pentheus - a sort of modern Philistine - Teiresias, who may be
termed the Max Muller of the Theban cycle, points out that the
story of Dionysus being inclosed in Zeus' thigh really arose from
the linguistic confusion between [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] and [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

On the whole, however - for I have quoted these two instances only
to show the unscientific character of early philology - we may say
that this important instrument in recreating the history of the
past was not really used by the ancients as a means of historical
criticism.  Nor did the ancients employ that other method, used to
such advantage in our own day, by which in the symbolism and
formulas of an advanced civilisation we can detect the unconscious
survival of ancient customs:  for, whereas in the sham capture of
the bride at a marriage feast, which was common in Wales till a
recent time, we can discern the lingering reminiscence of the
barbarous habit of exogamy, the ancient writers saw only the
deliberate commemoration of an historical event.

Aristotle does not tell us by what method he discovered that the
Greeks used to buy their wives in primitive times, but, judging by
his general principles, it was probably through some legend or myth
on the subject which lasted to his own day, and not, as we would
do, by arguing back from the marriage presents given to the bride
and her relatives. (4)

The origin of the common proverb 'worth so many beeves,' in which
we discern the unconscious survival of a purely pastoral state of
society before the use of metals was known, is ascribed by Plutarch
to the fact of Theseus having coined money bearing a bull's head.
Similarly, the Amathusian festival, in which a young man imitated
the labours of a woman in travail, is regarded by him as a rite
instituted in Ariadne's honour, and the Carian adoration of
asparagus as a simple commemoration of the adventure of the nymph
Perigune.  In the first of these WE discern the beginning of
agnation and kinsmanship through the father, which still lingers in
the 'couvee' of New Zealand tribes:  while the second is a relic of
the totem and fetish worship of plants.

Now, in entire opposition to this modern inductive principle of
research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive
man is entirely speculative and deductive.

The origin of society he ascribes to necessity, the mother of all
inventions, and imagines that individual man began deliberately to
herd together on account of the advantages of the principle of
division of labour and the rendering of mutual need.

It must, however, be borne in mind that Plato's object in this
whole passage in the REPUBLIC was, perhaps, not so much to analyse
the conditions of early society as to illustrate the importance of
the division of labour, the shibboleth of his political economy, by
showing what a powerful factor it must have been in the most
primitive as well as in the most complex states of society; just as
in the LAWS he almost rewrites entirely the history of the
Peloponnesus in order to prove the necessity of a balance of power.
He surely, I mean, must have recognised himself how essentially
incomplete his theory was in taking no account of the origin of
family life, the position and influence of women, and other social
questions, as well as in disregarding those deeper motives of
religion, which are such important factors in early civilisation,
and whose influence Aristotle seems to have clearly apprehended,
when he says that the aim of primitive society was not merely life
but the higher life, and that in the origin of society utility is
not the sole motive, but that there is something spiritual in it
if, at least, 'spiritual' will bring out the meaning of that
complex expression [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].
Otherwise, the whole account in the REPUBLIC of primitive man will
always remain as a warning against the intrusion of A PRIORI
speculations in the domain appropriate to induction.

Now, Aristotle's theory of the origin of society, like his
philosophy of ethics, rests ultimately on the principle of final
causes, not in the theological meaning of an aim or tendency
imposed from without, but in the scientific sense of function
corresponding to organ.  'Nature maketh no thing in vain' is the
text of Aristotle in this as in other inquiries.  Man being the
only animal possessed of the power of rational speech is, he
asserts, by nature intended to be social, more so than the bee or
any other gregarious animal.

He is [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and the national
tendency towards higher forms of perfection brings the 'armed
savage who used to sell his wife' to the free independence of a
free state, and to the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
which was the test of true citizenship.  The stages passed through
by humanity start with the family first as the ultimate unit.

The conglomeration of families forms a village ruled by that
patriarchal sway which is the oldest form of government in the
world, as is shown by the fact that all men count it to be the
constitution of heaven, and the villages are merged into the state,
and here the progression stops.

For Aristotle, like all Greek thinkers, found his ideal within the
walls of the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], yet perhaps
in his remark that a united Greece would rule the world we may
discern some anticipation of that 'federal union of free states
into one consolidated empire' which, more than the [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced], is to our eyes the ultimately perfect
polity.

How far Aristotle was justified in regarding the family as the
ultimate unit, with the materials afforded to him by Greek
literature, I have already noticed.  Besides, Aristotle, I may
remark, had he reflected on the meaning of that Athenian law which,
while prohibiting marriage with a uterine sister, permitted it with
a sister-german, or on the common tradition in Athens that before
the time of Cecrops children bore their mothers' names, or on some
of the Spartan regulations, could hardly have failed to see the
universality of kinsmanship through women in early days, and the
late appearance of monandry.  Yet, while he missed this point, in
common, it must be acknowledged, with many modern writers, such as
Sir Henry Maine, it is essentially as an explorer of inductive
instances that we recognise his improvement on Plato.  The treatise
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], did it remain to us in its
entirety, would have been one of the most valuable landmarks in the
progress of historical criticism, and the first scientific treatise
on the science of comparative politics.

A few fragments still remain to us, in one of which we find
Aristotle appealing to the authority of an ancient inscription on
the 'Disk of Iphitus,' one of the most celebrated Greek
antiquities, to corroborate his theory of the Lycurgean revival of
the Olympian festival; while his enormous research is evinced in
the elaborate explanation he gives of the historical origin of
proverbs such as [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], of
religious songs like the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of
the Botticean virgins, or the praises of love and war.

And, finally, it is to be observed how much wider than Plato's his
theory of the origin of society is.  They both rest on a
psychological basis, but Aristotle's recognition of the capacity
for progress and the tendency towards a higher life shows how much
deeper his knowledge of human nature was.

In imitation of these two philosophers, Polybius gives an account
of the origin of society in the opening to his philosophy of
history.  Somewhat in the spirit of Plato, he imagines that after
one of the cyclic deluges which sweep off mankind at stated periods
and annihilate all pre-existing civilisation, the few surviving
members of humanity coalesce for mutual protection, and, as in the
case with ordinary animals, the one most remarkable for physical
strength is elected king.  In a short time, owing to the workings
of sympathy and the desire of approbation, the moral qualities
begin to make their appearance, and intellectual instead of bodily
excellence becomes the qualification for sovereignty.

Other points, as the rise of law and the like, are dwelt on in a
somewhat modern spirit, and although Polybius seems not to have
employed the inductive method of research in this question, or
rather, I should say, of the hierarchical order of the rational
progress of ideas in life, he is not far removed from what the
laborious investigations of modern travellers have given us.

And, indeed, as regards the working of the speculative faculty in
the creation of history, it is in all respects marvellous how that
the most truthful accounts of the passage from barbarism to
civilisation in ancient literature come from the works of poets.
The elaborate researches of Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have
done little more than verify the theories put forward in the
PROMETHEUS BOUND and the DE NATURA RERUM; yet neither AEschylus nor
Lucretias followed in the modern path, but rather attained to truth
by a certain almost mystic power of creative imagination, such as
we now seek to banish from science as a dangerous power, though to
it science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities. (5)

Leaving then the question of the origin of society as treated by
the ancients, I shall now turn to the other and the more important
question of how far they may he said to have attained to what we
call the philosophy of history.

Now at the outset we must note that, while the conceptions of law
and order have been universally received as the governing
principles of the phenomena of nature in the sphere of physical
science, yet their intrusion into the domain of history and the
life of man has always been met with a strong opposition, on the
ground of the incalculable nature of two great forces acting on
human action, a certain causeless spontaneity which men call free
will, and the extra-natural interference which they attribute as a
constant attribute to God.

Now, that there is a science of the apparently variable phenomena
of history is a conception which WE have perhaps only recently
begun to appreciate; yet, like all other great thoughts, it seems
to have come to the Greek mind spontaneously, through a certain
splendour of imagination, in the morning tide of their
civilisation, before inductive research had armed them with the
instruments of verification.  For I think it is possible to discern
in some of the mystic speculations of the early Greek thinkers that
desire to discover what is that 'invariable existence of which
there are variable states,' and to incorporate it in some one
formula of law which may serve to explain the different
manifestations of all organic bodies, MAN INCLUDED, which is the
germ of the philosophy of history; the germ indeed of an idea of
which it is not too much to say that on it any kind of historical
criticism, worthy of the name, must ultimately rest.

For the very first requisite for any scientific conception of
history is the doctrine of uniform sequence:  in other words, that
certain events having happened, certain other events corresponding
to them will happen also; that the past is the key of the future.

Now at the birth of this great conception science, it is true,
presided, yet religion it was which at the outset clothed it in its
own garb, and familiarised men with it by appealing to their hearts
first and then to their intellects; knowing that at the beginning
of things it is through the moral nature, and not through the
intellectual, that great truths are spread.

So in Herodotus, who may be taken as a representative of the
orthodox tone of thought, the idea of the uniform sequence of cause
and effect appears under the theological aspect of Nemesis and
Providence, which is really the scientific conception of law, only
it is viewed from an ETHICAL standpoint.

Now in Thucydides the philosophy of history rests on the
probability, which the uniformity of human nature affords us, that
the future will in the course of human things resemble the past, if
not reproduce it.  He appears to contemplate a recurrence of the
phenomena of history as equally certain with a return of the
epidemic of the Great Plague.

Notwithstanding what German critics have written on the subject, we
must beware of regarding this conception as a mere reproduction of
that cyclic theory of events which sees in the world nothing but
the regular rotation of Strophe and Antistrophe, in the eternal
choir of life and death.

For, in his remarks on the excesses of the Corcyrean Revolution,
Thucydides distinctly rests his idea of the recurrence of history
on the psychological grounds of the general sameness of mankind.

'The sufferings,' he says, 'which revolution entailed upon the
cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always
will occurs as long as human nature remains the same, though in a
severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms according to
the variety of the particular cases.

'In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better
sentiments, because they are not confronted with imperious
necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of men's wants, and
so proves a hard taskmaster, which brings most men's characters to
a level with their fortunes.'



CHAPTER IV



IT is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of
manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings
on the uniform character of the nature of man.  Yet, after all is
said, these are perhaps but very general statements:  the ordinary
effects of peace and war are dwelt on, but there is no real
analysis of the immediate causes and general laws of the phenomena
of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth that if
humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is
partly in the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this
idea from Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian
Law of the three stages of thought, the theological, the
metaphysical, and the scientific:  for truly out of the vagueness
of theological mysticism this conception which we call the
Philosophy of History was raised to a scientific principle,
according to which the past was explained and the future predicted
by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of
humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first
explicit attempt to found a universal philosophy of history upon
wide rational grounds.  Having created an ideally perfect state,
the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex
causes which produce revolutions, of the moral effects of various
forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal
classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to
create history by the deductive method and to proceed from A PRIORI
psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the
apparent chaos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single
philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience
subsequently verifies for us.  Fichte thought he could predict the
world-plan from the idea of universal time.  Hegel dreamed he had
found the key to the mysteries of life in the development of
freedom, and Krause in the categories of being.  But the one
scientific basis on which the true philosophy of history must rest
is the complete knowledge of the laws of human nature in all its
wants, its aspirations, its powers and its tendencies:  and this
great truth, which Thucydides may be said in some measure to have
apprehended, was given to us first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either
his philosophy or his history is entirely and simply A PRIORI.  ON
EST DE SON SIECLE MEME QUAND ON Y PROTESTE, and so we find in him
continual references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean
system, the general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek
democracies.  For while, in his account of the method of forming an
ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed to fix his
gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure
reason, but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals
on earth:  yet, after all, the general character of the Platonic
method, which is what we are specially concerned with, is
essentially deductive and A PRIORI.  And he himself, in the
building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], making a clean sweep of all
history and all experience; and it was essentially as an A PRIORI
theorist that he is criticised by Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the
laws of political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first
note that the primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the
general principle, common to the vegetable and animal worlds as
well as to the world of history, that all created things are fated
to decay - a principle which, though expressed in the terms of a
mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps in its essence
scientific.  For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution
of matter and motion is the inevitable result of the nominal
persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as impossible
in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic 'city
of the sun' are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race
consequent on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation
of physical achievements over mental culture; while the
hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and
Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed in a
very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned
by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic
succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas in
the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts.  If the
theory of the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be
scientific, it must be universal, and so true of all the other
states as well as of the ideal.  Besides, a state usually changes
into its contrary and not to the form next to it; so the ideal
state would not change into Timocracy; while Oligarchy, more often
than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy.  Plato, besides, says nothing of
what a Tyranny would change to.  According to the cycle theory it
ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a fact one Tyranny
is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a Democracy as at
Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage.  The example of
Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a
Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela.  Besides, it is absurd to
represent greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice
as the root of Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies
money-making is forbidden by law.  And finally the Platonic theory
neglects the different kinds of democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's
POLITICS (v. 12.), which may he said to mark an era in the
evolution of historical criticism.  For there is nothing on which
Aristotle insists so strongly as that the generalisations from
facts ought to be added to the data of the A PRIORI method - a
principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive
speculative politics but of physics also:  for are not the residual
phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means
empirical.  On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly
styled IL MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO, may be said to have
apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively
empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both
in the process called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts,
which has been defined as the application to facts of such general
conceptions as may fix the important characteristics of the
phenomena, and present them permanently in their true relations.
He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is
incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of
man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that
inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they
are in the physical world, and that where the superficial observer
thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns
merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable results
of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the
philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man,
to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as
in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the
hierarchical progression of higher function from the lower forms of
life.  The important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of
anything we must 'study it in its growth from the very beginning,'
is formally set down in the opening of the POLITICS, where, indeed,
we shall find the other characteristic features of the modern
Evolutionary theory, such as the 'Differentiation of Function' and
the 'Survival of the Fittest' explicitly set forth.

What a valuable step this was in the improvement of the method of
historical criticism it is needless to point out.  By it, one may
say, the true thread was given to guide one's steps through the
bewildering labyrinth of facts.  For history (to use terms with
which Aristotle has made us familiar) may be looked at from two
essentially different standpoints; either as a work of art whose
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or final cause is external
to it and imposed on it from without; or as an organism containing
the law of its own development in itself, and working out its
perfection merely by the fact of being what it is.  Now, if we
adopt the former, which we may style the theological view, we shall
be in continual danger of tripping into the pitfall of some A
PRIORI conclusion - that bourne from which, it has been truly said,
no traveller ever returns.

The latter is the only scientific theory and was apprehended in its
fulness by Aristotle, whose application of the inductive method to
history, and whose employment of the evolutionary theory of
humanity, show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history
is nothing separate from the facts of history but is contained in
them, and that the rational law of the complex phenomena of life,
like the ideal in the world of thought, is to be reached through
the facts, not superimposed on them - [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced].

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of
historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his
attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a
philosophy of history on which I have touched above.  I mean the
assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development
of the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the
power of free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it
entirely.  The special acts of providence proceeding from God's
immediate government of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty
landmarks in history, would have been to him essentially disturbing
elements in that universal reign of law, the extent of whose
limitless empire he of all the great thinkers of antiquity was the
first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper
conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer
thought of God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face
haunting wood and glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge
continually interfering in the world's history to bring the wicked
to punishment and the proud to a fall.  God to him was the
incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the
contemplation of his own perfection, one whom Philosophy might
imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the sublime
indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of men,
their desires or their sins?  While, as regards the other
difficulty and the formation of a philosophy of history, the
conflict of free will with general laws appears first in Greek
thought in the usual theological form in which all great ideas seem
to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of OEdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying
the struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force
of circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks
those same lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less
artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws of
physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural
influence.  The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and
then punishment, are no longer 'viper-tressed goddesses with eyes
and mouth aflame,' but those evil thoughts which harbour within the
impure soul.  In this, as in all other points, to arrive at
Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern
thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as
essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious
of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of
force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is
inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which
is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and
circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good
and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the
one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated
for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the
nature of man (a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days
when the 'race theory' is supposed to be a sufficient explanation
of the Hindoo, and the latitude and longitude of a country the best
guide to its morals(6)) Aristotle is completely unaware.  I do not
allude to such smaller points as the oligarchical tendencies of a
horse-breeding country and the democratic influence of the
proximity of the sea (important though they are for the
consideration of Greek history), but rather to those wider views in
the seventh book of his POLITICS, where he attributes the happy
union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments with the
spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and
points out how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental
faculties of its inhabitants and renders them incapable of social
organisation or extended empire; while to the enervating heat of
eastern countries was due that want of spirit and bravery which
then, as now, was the characteristic of the population in that
quarter of the globe.

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political
revolutions and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther
and points out the psychological influences on a people's character
exercised by the various extremes of climate - in both cases the
first appearance of a most valuable form of historical criticism.

To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are
of no account.  From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to
Polybius.

The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the
Arcadian historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the
method by which each of the three writers, whom I have selected as
the highest expression of the rationalism of his respective age,
attained to his ideal state:  for the latter conception may be in a
measure regarded as representing the most spiritual principle which
they could discern in history.

Now, Plato created his on A PRIORI principles; Aristotle formed his
by an analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his
realised for him in the actual world of fact.  Aristotle criticised
the deductive speculations of Plato by means of inductive negative
instances, but Polybius will not take the 'Cloud City' of the
REPUBLIC into account at all.  He compares it to an athlete who has
never run on 'Constitution Hill,' to a statue so beautiful that it
is entirely removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and
consequently from the canons of criticism.

The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual
counteraction of three opposing forces, (7) that stable equilibrium
in politics which was the ideal of all the theoretical writers of
antiquity.  And in connection with this point it will be convenient
to notice here how much truth there is contained in the accusation
often brought against the ancients that they knew nothing of the
idea of Progress, for the meaning of many of their speculations
will be hidden from us if we do not try and comprehend first what
their aim was, and secondly why it was so.

Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least
inaccurate.  The prayer of Plato's ideal City - [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced], might be written as a text over the door of
the last Temple to Humanity raised by the disciples of Fourier and
Saint-Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal principle
was order and permanence, not indefinite progress.  For, setting
aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to
reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the
modern conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm
and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material
improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to
us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have
been strangely free.  For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of
the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity
and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently
speculative and often almost mystic in its character, aiming at
culture and not utility, at higher spirituality and more intense
reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of
locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which
our modern scientific school ceases not to boast.  And lastly, and
perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the 'plague spot of all
Greek states,' as one of their own writers has called it, was the
terrible insecurity to life and property which resulted from the
factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all
times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in
the middle ages of Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how
it was that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek
political theorists were, yet, their end once attained, no modern
conservatives raised such outcry against the slightest innovation.
Even acknowledged improvements in such things as the games of
children or the modes of music were regarded by them with feelings
of extreme apprehension as the herald of the DRAPEAU ROUGE of
reform.  And secondly, it will show us how it was that Polybius
found his ideal in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle, like
Mr. Bright, in the middle classes.  Polybius, however, is not
content merely with pointing out his ideal state, but enters at
considerable length into the question of those general laws whose
consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of
history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are
fated to decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that 'as
iron produces rust and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it,
so every state has in it the seeds of its own corruption.'  He is
not, however, content to rest there, but proceeds to deal with the
more immediate causes of revolutions, which he says are twofold in
nature, either external or internal.  Now, the former, depending as
they do on the synchronous conjunction of other events outside the
sphere of scientific estimation, are from their very character
incalculable; but the latter, though assuming many forms, always
result from the over-great preponderance of any single element to
the detriment of the others, the rational law lying at the base of
all varieties of political changes being that stability can result
only from the statical equilibrium produced by the counteraction of
opposing parts, since the more simple a constitution is the more it
is insecure.  Plato had pointed out before how the extreme liberty
of a democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius analyses
the law and shows the scientific principles on which it rests.

The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an
important era in the philosophy of history.  Its special
applicability to the politics of our own day has been illustrated
in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French state had lost
those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocracy and
moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only
barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences
against the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced].

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining,
and which has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that
general law common to all organic bodies which we call the
Instability of the Homogeneous.  The various manifestations of this
law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of
the different forms of government, (8) are expounded with great
clearness by Polybius, who claimed for his theory, in the
Thucydidean spirit, that it is a [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], not a mere [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],
and that a knowledge of it will enable the impartial observer (9)
to discover at any time what period of its constitutional evolution
any particular state has already reached and into what form it will
be next differentiated, though possibly the exact time of the
changes may be more or less uncertain. (10)

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political
revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said
to show what is his true position in the rational development of
the 'Idea' which I have called the Philosophy of History, because
it is the unifying of history.  Seen darkly as it is through the
glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more metaphysical than
scientific with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the eagle-
flight of speculation, to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul
impatient of those slower and surer inductive methods which
Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his greater master, showed
were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of
brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius?  Does any new method remain
for him?  Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late
to be original.  To Thucydides belongs the honour of being the
first in the history of Greek thought to discern the supreme calm
of law and order underlying the fitful storms of life, and Plato
and Aristotle each represents a great new principle.  To Polybius
belongs the office - how noble an office he made it his writings
show - of making more explicit the ideas which were implicit in his
predecessors, of showing that they were of wider applicability and
perhaps of deeper meaning than they had seemed before, of examining
with more minuteness the laws which they had discovered, and
finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had done the
range of science and the means it offered for analysing the present
and predicting what was to come.  His office thus was to gather up
what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider
application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought.  When the
Philosophy of history appears next, as in Plutarch's tract on 'Why
God's anger is delayed,' the pendulum of thought had swung back to
where it began.  His theory was introduced to the Romans under the
cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the
philosophical panegyric of their state.  The last notice of it in
Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the
stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier
to commend than to produce and in no case lasting.  Yet Polybius
had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the
rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy
fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household
over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of
the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the
means by which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history.
The principle of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well
as in organic life:  Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal
ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu
and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out
those great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of
this spirit of historical criticism, I shall pass over those
annalists and chroniclers who intervened between Thucydides and
Polybius.  Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light on the real
nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other
forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character
and rise of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific
study of history which cause such a wide gap between these two
historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the
Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena
for the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific
investigation into laws.

The new age is the age of style.  The same spirit of exclusive
attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne,
prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the
later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained
gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history.  The
rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to
the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more
than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and
historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but
by the goodness of the Greek they write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by
Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more
accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his
achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of
romance.  The appearance of all great men in the world is followed
invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency
to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical
criticism.  An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a
Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of
rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very long ago.
While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which Western and
Eastern thought met with such strange result to both, diverted the
critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of grammar,
philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of that
University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of
that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes
out new methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an
ignorance of the true principles of research, an enthusiastic
spirit for accumulating materials with a wonderful incapacity to
use them.  Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of
Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of genius
on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I
have a short time ago dwelt.  Born in the serene and pure air of
the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to reproduce in
his work the character of the place which gave him birth.  For, of
all the historians - I do not say of antiquity but of all time -
none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief
in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling
superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek
text that cannot be reproduced](11)) which he himself is compelled
to notice as the characteristics of some of the historians who
preceded him.  Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less
blessed in the wondrous time of his birth.  For, representing in
himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied
in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his
day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend,'
as has been said, 'more clearly than the Romans themselves the
historical position of Rome,' and to discern with greater insight
than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient
civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills,
and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, (12) the events of the world were
unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular
countries.  Now, for the first time the universal empire of the
Romans rendered a universal history possible. (13)  This, then, is
the august motive of his work:  to trace the gradual rise of this
Italian city from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow
strait of Messina and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the
time when Corinth in the East and Carthage in the West fell before
the resistless wave of empire and the eagles of Rome passed on the
wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules
to Syria and the Nile.  At the same time he recognised that the
scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under the aegis of God's
will. (14)  For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says,
the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Polybius is that
power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call
it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and
natural causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we
should say, between God's mediate and immediate government of the
world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of
Man, he will have nothing to do:  still less with any idea of
chance as a factor in the phenomena of life.  Chance and miracles,
he says, are mere expressions for our ignorance of rational causes.
The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a
vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a
consistent attitude of mind never argued about or even explained,
is by Polybius analysed and formulated as the great instrument of
historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet
was sceptical at times.  Thucydides simply ignored the
supernatural.  He did not discuss it, but he annihilated it by
explaining history without it.  Polybius enters at length into the
whole question and explains its origin and the method of treating
it.  Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's dream.  Thucydides
would have ignored it entirely.  Polybius explains it.  He is the
culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic.  'Nothing,'
he says, 'shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to account for
any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural
intervention.  History is a search for rational causes, and there
is nothing in the world - even those phenomena which seem to us the
most remote from law and improbable - which is not the logical and
inevitable result of certain rational antecedents.'

Some things, of course, are to be rejected A PRIORI without
entering into the subject:  'As regards such miracles,' he says,
(15) 'as that on a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never
falls though the statue stands in the open air, or that those who
enter God's shrine in Arcadia lose their natural shadows, I cannot
really be expected to argue upon the subject.  For these things are
not only utterly improbable but absolutely impossible.'

'For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain
a task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit
the possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at
issue.'

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle
is to annihilate the possibility of history:  for just as
scientific and chemical experiments would be either impossible or
useless if exposed to the chance of continued interference on the
part of some foreign body, so the laws and principles which govern
history, the causes of phenomena, the evolution of progress, the
whole science, in a word, of man's dealings with his own race and
with nature, will remain a sealed book to him who admits the
possibility of extra-natural interference.

The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on A PRIORI
rational grounds, but in the case of events which we know to have
happened the scientific historian will not rest till he has
discovered their natural causes which, for instance, in the case of
the wonderful rise of the Roman Empire - the most marvellous thing,
Polybius says, which God ever brought about (16) - are to be found
in the excellence of their constitution ([Greek text which cannot
be reproduced]), the wisdom of their advisers, their splendid
military arrangements, and their superstition ([Greek text which
cannot be reproduced]).  For while Polybius regarded the revealed
religion as, of course, objective reality of truth, (17) he laid
great stress on its moral subjective influence, going, in one
passage on the subject, even so far as almost to excuse the
introduction of the supernatural in very small quantities into
history on account of the extremely good effect it would have on
pious people.

But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern
history which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of
rationalism as one preserved to us in the Vatican - strange
resting-place for it! - in which he treats of the terrible decay of
population which had fallen on his native land in his own day, and
which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a special
judgment of God sending childlessness on women as a punishment for
the sins of the people.  For it was a disaster quite without
parallel in the history of the land, and entirely unforeseen by any
of its political-economy writers who, on the contrary, were always
anticipating that danger would arise from an excess of population
overrunning its means of subsistence, and becoming unmanageable
through its size.  Polybius, however, will have nothing to do with
either priest or worker of miracles in this matter.  He will not
even seek that 'sacred Heart of Greece,' Delphi, Apollo's shrine,
whose inspiration even Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom
Socrates bowed.  How foolish, he says, were the man who on this
matter would pray to God.  We must search for the rational causes,
and the causes are seen to be clear, and the method of prevention
also.  He then proceeds to notice how all this arose from the
general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense of
educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and
avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational
principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles
as violation of inviolable laws is entirely A PRIORI - for
discussion of such a matter is, of course, impossible for a
rational thinker - yet his rejection of supernatural intervention
rests entirely on the scientific grounds of the necessity of
looking for natural causes.  And he is quite logical in maintaining
his position on these principles.  For, where it is either
difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for phenomena,
or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the
alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his
essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically
forced on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the
express ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been
ascertained.  He would, of course, have been the first to welcome
our modern discoveries in the matter.  The passage in question is
in every way one of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of
course, as signifying any inclination on his part to acquiesce in
the supernatural, but because it shows how essentially logical and
rational his method of argument was, and how candid and fair his
mind.

Having now examined Polybius's attitude towards the supernatural
and the general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to
examine the method he pursued in his scientific investigation of
the complex phenomena of life.  For, as I have said before in the
course of this essay, what is important in all great writers is not
so much the results they arrive at as the methods they pursue.  The
increased knowledge of facts may alter any conclusion in history as
in physical science, and the canons of speculative historical
credibility must be acknowledged to appeal rather to that
subjective attitude of mind which we call the historic sense than
to any formulated objective rules.  But a scientific method is a
gain for all time, and the true if not the only progress of
historical criticism consists in the improvement of the instruments
of research.

Now first, as regards his conception of history, I have already
pointed out that it was to him essentially a search for causes, a
problem to be solved, not a picture to be painted, a scientific
investigation into laws and tendencies, not a mere romantic account
of startling incident and wondrous adventure.  Thucydides, in the
opening of his great work, had sounded the first note of the
scientific conception of history.  'The absence of romance in my
pages,' he says, 'will, I fear, detract somewhat from its value,
but I have written my work not to be the exploit of a passing hour
but as the possession of all time.' (18)  Polybius follows with
words almost entirely similar.  If, he says, we banish from history
the consideration of causes, methods and motives ([Greek text which
cannot be reproduced]), and refuse to consider how far the result
of anything is its rational consequent, what is left is a mere
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], not a [Greek text which
cannot be reproduced], an oratorical essay which may give pleasure
for the moment, but which is entirely without any scientific value
for the explanation of the future.  Elsewhere he says that 'history
robbed of the exposition of its causes and laws is a profitless
thing, though it may allure a fool.'  And all through his history
the same point is put forward and exemplified in every fashion.

So far for the conception of history.  Now for the groundwork.  As
regards the character of the phenomena to be selected by the
scientific investigator, Aristotle had laid down the general
formula that nature should be studied in her normal manifestations.
Polybius, true to his character of applying explicitly the
principles implicit in the work of others, follows out the doctrine
of Aristotle, and lays particular stress on the rational and
undisturbed character of the development of the Roman constitution
as affording special facilities for the discovery of the laws of
its progress.  Political revolutions result from causes either
external or internal.  The former are mere disturbing forces which
lie outside the sphere of scientific calculation.  It is the latter
which are important for the establishing of principles and the
elucidation of the sequences of rational evolution.

He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important
truths of the modern methods of investigation:  I mean that
principle which lays down that just as the study of physiology
should precede the study of pathology, just as the laws of disease
are best discovered by the phenomena presented in health, so the
method of arriving at all great social and political truths is by
the investigation of those cases where development has been normal,
rational and undisturbed.

The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with,
the more difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its
progress and to analyse the separate forces of its civilisation, is
one the validity of which is now generally recognised by those who
pretend to a scientific treatment of all history:  and while we
have seen that Aristotle anticipated it in a general formula, to
Polybius belongs the honour of being the first to apply it
explicitly in the sphere of history.

I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of
his work was essentially the search for causes; and true to his
analytical spirit he is careful to examine what a cause really is
and in what part of the antecedents of any consequent it is to be
looked for.  To give an illustration:  As regards the origin of the
war with Perseus, some assigned as causes the expulsion of
Abrupolis by Perseus, the expedition of the latter to Delphi, the
plot against Eumenes and the seizure of the ambassadors in Boeotia;
of these incidents the two former, Polybius points out, were merely
the pretexts, the two latter merely the occasions of the war.  The
war was really a legacy left to Perseus by his father, who was
determined to fight it out with Rome. (19)

Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea.  Thucydides
had pointed out the difference between the real and the alleged
cause, and the Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced], draws the distinction between cause
and occasion with the brilliancy of an epigram.  But the explicit
and rational investigation of the difference between [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced], and [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] was reserved for Polybius.  No canon of historical
criticism can be said to be of more real value than that involved
in this distinction, and the overlooking of it has filled our
histories with the contemptible accounts of the intrigues of
courtiers and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs
influence - particulars interesting, no doubt, to those who would
ascribe the Reformation to Anne Boleyn's pretty face, the Persian
war to the influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from Atossa,
or the French Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any
value for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to
return, is not yet exhausted.  There is another aspect in which it
may be regarded, and I shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian
has to contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come
under his notice:  D'Alembert's suggestion that at the end of every
century a selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if
it was really intended seriously) could not, of course, be
entertained for a moment.  A problem loses all its value when it
becomes simplified, and the world would be all the poorer if the
Sibyl of History burned her volumes.  Besides, as Gibbon pointed
out, 'a Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant fact
relations which the vulgar overlook.'

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the
particular elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing
and extraneous causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though
sometimes, as in the case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is
enabled to observe phenomena in a certain degree of isolation).  So
he is compelled either to use the deductive mode of arguing from
general laws or to employ the method of abstraction, which gives a
fictitious isolation to phenomena never so isolated in actual
existence.  And this is exactly what Polybius has done as well as
Thucydides.  For, as has been well remarked, there is in the works
of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive;
whatever they write is penetrated through and through with a
specific quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose, which
we may contrast with the more comprehensive width as manifested not
merely in the modern mind, but also in Herodotus.  Thucydides,
regarding society as influenced entirely by political motives, took
no account of forces of a different nature, and consequently his
results, like those of most modern political economists, have to be
modified largely (20) before they come to correspond with what we
know was the actual state of fact.  Similarly, Polybius will deal
only with those forces which tended to bring the civilised world
under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the Thucydidean spirit
points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in his pages
which is the result of the abstract method ([Greek text which
cannot be reproduced]) being careful also to tell us that his
rejection of all other forces is essentially deliberate and the
result of a preconceived theory and by no means due to carelessness
of any kind.

Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality
of its employment in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the
suitable occasion for any discussion.  It is, however, in all ways
worthy of note that Polybius is not merely conscious of, but dwells
with particular weight on, the fact which is usually urged as the
strongest objection to the employment of the abstract method - I
mean the conception of a society as a sort of human organism whose
parts are indissolubly connected with one another and all affected
when one member is in any way agitated.  This conception of the
organic nature of society appears first in Plato and Aristotle, who
apply it to cities.  Polybius, as his wont is, expands it to be a
general characteristic of all history.  It is an idea of the very
highest importance, especially to a man like Polybius whose
thoughts are continually turned towards the essential unity of
history and the impossibility of isolation.

Farther, as regards the particular method of investigating that
group of phenomena obtained for him by the abstract method, he will
adopt, he tells us, neither the purely deductive nor the purely
inductive mode but the union of both.  In other words, he formally
adopts that method of analysis upon the importance of which I have
dwelt before.

And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous simplicity in the
elements under consideration is the result of the employment of the
abstract method, even within the limit thus obtained a certain
selection must be made, and a selection involves a theory.  For the
facts of life cannot be tabulated with as great an ease as the
colours of birds and insects can be tabulated.  Now, Polybius
points out that those phenomena particularly are to be dwelt on
which may serve as a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or
sample, and show the character of the tendencies of the age as
clearly as 'a single drop from a full cask will be enough to
disclose the nature of the whole contents.'  This recognition of
the importance of single facts, not in themselves but because of
the spirit they represent, is extremely scientific; for we know
that from the single bone, or tooth even, the anatomist can
recreate entirely the skeleton of the primeval horse, and the
botanist tell the character of the flora and fauna of a district
from a single specimen.

Regarding truth as 'the most divine thing in Nature,' the very 'eye
and light of history without which it moves a blind thing,'
Polybius spared no pains in the acquisition of historical materials
or in the study of the sciences of politics and war, which he
considered were so essential to the training of the scientific
historian, and the labour he took is mirrored in the many ways in
which he criticises other authorities.

There is something, as a rule, slightly contemptible about ancient
criticism.  The modern idea of the critic as the interpreter, the
expounder of the beauty and excellence of the work he selects,
seems quite unknown.  Nothing can be more captious or unfair, for
instance, than the method by which Aristotle criticised the ideal
state of Plato in his ethical works, and the passages quoted by
Polybius from Timaeus show that the latter historian fully deserved
the punning name given to him.  But in Polybius there is, I think,
little of that bitterness and pettiness of spirit which
characterises most other writers, and an incidental story he tells
of his relations with one of the historians whom he criticised
shows that he was a man of great courtesy and refinement of taste -
as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in the society of
those who were of great and noble birth.

Now, as regards the character of the canons by which he criticises
the works of other authors, in the majority of cases he employs
simply his own geographical and military knowledge, showing, for
instance, the impossibility in the accounts given of Nabis's march
from Sparta simply by his acquaintance with the spots in question;
or the inconsistency of those of the battle of Issus; or of the
accounts given by Ephorus of the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea.
In the latter case he says, if any one will take the trouble to
measure out the ground of the site of the battle and then test the
manoeuvres given, he will find how inaccurate the accounts are.

In other cases he appeals to public documents, the importance of
which he was always foremost in recognising; showing, for instance,
by a document in the public archives of Rhodes how inaccurate were
the accounts given of the battle of Lade by Zeno and Antisthenes.
Or he appeals to psychological probability, rejecting, for
instance, the scandalous stories told of Philip of Macedon, simply
from the king's general greatness of character, and arguing that a
boy so well educated and so respectably connected as Demochares
(xii. 14) could never have been guilty of that of which evil rumour
accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timaeus, who had
been unsparing of his strictures on others.  The general point
which he makes against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian,
is that he derived his knowledge of history not from the dangerous
perils of a life of action but in the secure indolence of a narrow
scholastic life.  There is, indeed, no point on which he is so
vehement as this.  'A history,' he says, 'written in a library
gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture of history as a
painting which is copied not from a living animal but from a
stuffed one.'

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the
history of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes
from books, than there is between the scenes of real life and the
fictitious landscapes of theatrical scenery.  Besides this, he
enters into somewhat elaborate detailed criticism of passages where
he thought Timaeus was following a wrong method and perverting
truth, passages which it will be worth while to examine in detail.

Timaeus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a
war-horse on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that
people.  Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference
is quite unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary
institutions common to all barbarous tribes.  Timaeus here, as was
common with Greek writers, is arguing back from some custom of the
present to an historical event in the past.  Polybius really is
employing the comparative method, showing how the custom was an
ordinary step in the civilisation of every early people.

In another place, (21) he shows how illogical is the scepticism of
Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by
appealing to the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in
Carthage; pointing out how impossible it was, on any other theory
except that it belonged to Phalaris, to account for the presence in
Carthage of a bull of this peculiar character with a door between
his shoulders.  But one of the great points which he uses against
this Sicilian historian is in reference to the question of the
origin of the Locrian colony.  In accordance with the received
tradition on the subject, Aristotle had represented the Locrian
colony as founded by some Parthenidae or slaves' children, as they
were called, a statement which seems to have roused the indignation
of Timaeus, who went to a good deal of trouble to confute this
theory.  He does so on the following grounds:-

First of all, he points out that in the ancient days the Greeks had
no slaves at all, so the mention of them in the matter is an
anachronism; and next he declares that he was shown in the Greek
city of Locris certain ancient inscriptions in which their relation
to the Italian city was expressed in terms of the position between
parent and child, which showed also that mutual rights of
citizenship were accorded to each city.  Besides this, he appeals
to various questions of improbability as regards their
international relationship, on which Polybius takes diametrically
opposite grounds which hardly call for discussion.  And in favour
of his own view he urges two points more:  first, that the
Lacedaemonians being allowed furlough for the purpose of seeing
their wives at home, it was unlikely that the Locrians should not
have had the same privilege; and next, that the Italian Locrians
knew nothing of the Aristotelian version and had, on the contrary,
very severe laws against adulterers, runaway slaves and the like.
Now, most of these questions rest on mere probability, which is
always such a subjective canon that an appeal to it is rarely
conclusive.  I would note, however, as regards the inscriptions
which, if genuine, would of course have settled the matter, that
Polybius looks on them as a mere invention on the part of Timaeus,
who, he remarks, gives no details about them, though, as a rule, he
is over-anxious to give chapter and verse for everything.  A
somewhat more interesting point is that where he attacks Timaeus
for the introduction of fictitious speeches into his narrative; for
on this point Polybius seems to be far in advance of the opinions
held by literary men on the subject not merely in his own day, but
for centuries after.

Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and fictitious.
Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out
what people really said, he put down what they ought to have said.
Sallust alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into
the mouth of the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the
speeches given in the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian
conspiracy are very different from the same orations as they appear
in Cicero.  Livy makes his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic
with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a Scaevola.  And even in
later days, when shorthand reporters attended the debates of the
senate and a DAILY NEWS was published in Rome, we find that one of
the most celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the Emperor
Claudius gives the Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an inscription
discovered recently at Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches
were not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a
certain dramatic element which it was allowable to introduce into
history for the purpose of giving more life and reality to the
narration, and were to be criticised, not as we should, by arguing
how in an age before shorthand was known such a report was possible
or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition could bring
down such an accurate verbal account, but by the higher test of
their psychological probability as regards the persons in whose
mouths they are placed.  An ancient historian in answer to modern
criticism would say, probably, that these fictitious speeches were
in reality more truthful than the actual ones, just as Aristotle
claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth in comparison to
history.  The whole point is interesting as showing how far in
advance of his age Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his
writings what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal
writer of history; and no small light will be thrown on the
progress of historical criticism if we strive to collect and
analyse what in Polybius are more or less scattered expressions.
The ideal historian must be contemporary with the events he
describes, or removed from them by one generation only.  Where it
is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where
that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and stories
carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in place
of what is true.  He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the
experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a
university town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a
man not merely of thought but of action, one who can do great
things as well as write of them, who in the sphere of history could
be what Byron and AEschylus were in the sphere of poetry, at once
LE CHANTRE ET LE HEROS.

He is to keep before his eyes the fact that chance is merely a
synonym for our ignorance; that the reign of law pervades the
domain of history as much as it does that of political science.  He
is to accustom himself to look on all occasions for rational and
natural causes.  And while he is to recognise the practical utility
of the supernatural, in an educational point of view, he is not
himself to indulge in such intellectual beating of the air as to
admit the possibility of the violation of inviolable laws, or to
argue in a sphere wherein argument is A PRIORI annihilated.  He is
to be free from all bias towards friend and country; he is to be
courteous and gentle in criticism; he is not to regard history as a
mere opportunity for splendid and tragic writing; nor is he to
falsify truth for the sake of a paradox or an epigram.

While acknowledging the importance of particular facts as samples
of higher truths, he is to take a broad and general view of
humanity.  He is to deal with the whole race and with the world,
not with particular tribes or separate countries.  He is to bear in
mind that the world is really an organism wherein no one part can
be moved without the others being affected also.  He is to
distinguish between cause and occasion, between the influence of
general laws and particular fancies, and he is to remember that the
greatest lessons of the world are contained in history and that it
is the historian's duty to manifest them so as to save nations from
following those unwise policies which always lead to dishonour and
ruin, and to teach individuals to apprehend by the intellectual
culture of history those truths which else they would have to learn
in the bitter school of experience,

Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian's
being contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the
historian is a mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true.  But
to appreciate the harmony and rational position of the facts of a
great epoch, to discover its laws, the causes which produced it and
the effects which it generates, the scene must be viewed from a
certain height and distance to be completely apprehended.  A
thoroughly contemporary historian such as Lord Clarendon or
Thucydides is in reality part of the history he criticises; and, in
the case of such contemporary historians as Fabius and Philistus,
Polybius in compelled to acknowledge that they are misled by
patriotic and other considerations.  Against Polybius himself no
such accusation can be made.  He indeed of all men is able, as from
some lofty tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient
world, the triumph of Roman institutions and of Greek thought which
is the last message of the old world and, in a more spiritual
sense, has become the Gospel of the new.

One thing indeed he did not see, or if he saw it, he thought but
little of it - how from the East there was spreading over the
world, as a wave spreads, a spiritual inroad of new religions from
the time when the Pessinuntine mother of the gods, a shapeless mass
of stone, was brought to the eternal city by her holiest citizen,
to the day when the ship CASTOR AND POLLUX stood in at Puteoli, and
St. Paul turned his face towards martyrdom and victory at Rome.
Polybius was able to predict, from his knowledge of the causes of
revolutions and the tendencies of the various forms of governments,
the uprising of that democratic tone of thought which, as soon as a
seed is sown in the murder of the Gracchi and the exile of Marius,
culminated as all democratic movements do culminate, in the supreme
authority of one man, the lordship of the world under the world's
rightful lord, Caius Julius Caesar.  This, indeed, he saw in no
uncertain way.  But the turning of all men's hearts to the East,
the first glimmering of that splendid dawn which broke over the
hills of Galilee and flooded the earth like wine, was hidden from
his eyes.

There are many points in the description of the ideal historian
which one may compare to the picture which Plato has given us of
the ideal philosopher.  They are both 'spectators of all time and
all existence.'  Nothing is contemptible in their eyes, for all
things have a meaning, and they both walk in august reasonableness
before all men, conscious of the workings of God yet free from all
terror of mendicant priest or vagrant miracle-worker.  But the
parallel ends here.  For the one stands aloof from the world-storm
of sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and sunlit heights,
loving knowledge for the sake of knowledge and wisdom for the joy
of wisdom, while the other is an eager actor in the world ever
seeking to apply his knowledge to useful things.  Both equally
desire truth, but the one because of its utility, the other for its
beauty.  The historian regards it as the rational principle of all
true history, and no more.  To the other it comes as an all-
pervading and mystic enthusiasm, 'like the desire of strong wine,
the craving of ambition, the passionate love of what is beautiful.'

Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more
spiritual qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of
all men possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of
that great rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very
latest words of modern science.  Nor yet is he to be regarded
merely in the narrow light in which he is estimated by most modern
critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more.
For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as
the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which,
springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength
and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of
Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.

For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the
seven-hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his
history, which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed
of an Empire where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the
Pope for the souls of men, and so has passed into the conception of
God's spiritual empire and the universal brotherhood of man and
widened into the huge ocean of universal thought as the Peneus
loses itself in the sea.

Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece.  The writer
who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer
of biographies only.  I will not here touch on Plutarch's
employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of
inscription and statue, of public document and building and the
like, because it involves no new method.  It is his attitude
towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a
violation of the laws of nature a miracle is impossible.  It is
absurd, he says, to imagine that the statue of a saint can speak,
and that an inanimate object not possessing the vocal organs should
be able to utter an articulate sound.  Upon the other hand, he
protests against science imagining that, by explaining the natural
causes of things, it has explained away their transcendental
meaning.  'When the tears on the cheek of some holy statue have
been analysed into the moisture which certain temperatures produce
on wood and marble, it yet by no means follows that they were not a
sign of grief and mourning set there by God Himself.'  When Lampon
saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen of the supreme
rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the abnormal
development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation of
the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it
was the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came
about, of the former to show why it was so formed and what it so
portended.  The progression of thought is exemplified in all
particulars.  Herodotus had a glimmering sense of the impossibility
of a violation of nature.  Thucydides ignored the supernatural.
Polybius rationalised it.  Plutarch raises it to its mystical
heights again, though he bases it on law.  In a word, Plutarch felt
that while science brings the supernatural down to the natural, yet
ultimately all that is natural is really supernatural.  To him, as
to many of our own day, religion was that transcendental attitude
of the mind which, contemplating a world resting on inviolable law,
is yet comforted and seeks to worship God not in the violation but
in the fulfilment of nature.

It may seem paradoxical to quote in connection with the priest of
Chaeronea such a pure rationalist as Mr. Herbert Spencer; yet when
we read as the last message of modern science that 'when the
equation of life has been reduced to its lowest terms the symbols
are symbols still,' mere signs, that is, of that unknown reality
which underlies all matter and all spirit, we may feel how over the
wide strait of centuries thought calls to thought and how Plutarch
has a higher position than is usually claimed for him in the
progress of the Greek intellect.

And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch
himself but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of
Greek civilisation has been passed over by modern critics.  To us,
indeed, the bare rock to which the Parthenon serves as a crown, and
which lies between Colonus and Attica's violet hills, will always
be the holiest spot in the land of Greece:  and Delphi will come
next, and then the meadows of Eurotas where that noble people lived
who represented in Hellenic thought the reaction of the law of duty
against the law of beauty, the opposition of conduct to culture.
Yet, as one stands on the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
of Cithaeron and looks out on the great double plain of Boeotia,
the enormous importance of the division of Hellas comes to one's
mind with great force.  To the north are Orchomenus and the Minyan
treasure-house, seat of those merchant princes of Phoenicia who
brought to Greece the knowledge of letters and the art of working
in gold.  Thebes is at our feet with the gloom of the terrible
legends of Greek tragedy still lingering about it, the birthplace
of Pindar, the nurse of Epaminondas and the Sacred Band.

And from out of the plain where 'Mars loved to dance,' rises the
Muses' haunt, Helicon, by whose silver streams Corinna and Hesiod
sang; while far away under the white aegis of those snow-capped
mountains lies Chaeronea and the Lion plain where with vain
chivalry the Greeks strove to check Macedon first and afterwards
Rome; Chaeronea, where in the Martinmas summer of Greek
civilisation Plutarch rose from the drear waste of a dying religion
as the aftermath rises when the mowers think they have left the
field bare.

Greek philosophy began and ended in scepticism:  the first and the
last word of Greek history was Faith.

Splendid thus in its death, like winter sunsets, the Greek religion
passed away into the horror of night.  For the Cimmerian darkness
was at hand, and when the schools of Athens were closed and the
statue of Athena broken, the Greek spirit passed from the gods and
the history of its own land to the subtleties of defining the
doctrine of the Trinity and the mystical attempts to bring Plato
into harmony with Christ and to reconcile Gethsemane and the Sermon
on the Mount with the Athenian prison and the discussion in the
woods of Colonus.  The Greek spirit slept for wellnigh a thousand
years.  When it woke again, like Antaeus it had gathered strength
from the earth where it lay; like Apollo it had lost none of its
divinity through its long servitude.

In the history of Roman thought we nowhere find any of those
characteristics of the Greek Illumination which I have pointed out
are the necessary concomitants of the rise of historical criticism.
The conservative respect for tradition which made the Roman people
delight in the ritual and formulas of law, and is as apparent in
their politics as in their religion, was fatal to any rise of that
spirit of revolt against authority the importance of which, as a
factor in intellectual progress, we have already seen.

The whitened tables of the Pontifices preserved carefully the
records of the eclipses and other atmospherical phenomena, and what
we call the art of verifying dates was known to them at an early
time; but there was no spontaneous rise of physical science to
suggest by its analogies of law and order a new method of research,
nor any natural springing up of the questioning spirit of
philosophy with its unification of all phenomena and all knowledge.
At the very time when the whole tide of Eastern superstition was
sweeping into the heart of the Capital the Senate banished the
Greek philosophers from Rome.  And of the three systems which did
at length take some root in the city, those of Zeno and Epicurus
were used merely as the rule for the ordering of life, while the
dogmatic scepticism of Carneades, by its very principles,
annihilated the possibility of argument and encouraged a perfect
indifference to research.

Nor were the Romans ever fortunate enough like the Greeks to have
to face the incubus of any dogmatic system of legends and myths,
the immoralities and absurdities of which might excite a
revolutionary outbreak of sceptical criticism.  For the Roman
religion became as it were crystallised and isolated from progress
at an early period of its evolution.  Their gods remained mere
abstractions of commonplace virtues or uninteresting
personifications of the useful things of life.  The old primitive
creed was indeed always upheld as a state institution on account of
the enormous facilities it offered for cheating in politics, but as
a spiritual system of belief it was unanimously rejected at a very
early period both by the common people and the educated classes,
for the sensible reason that it was so extremely dull.  The former
took refuge in the mystic sensualities of the worship of Isis, the
latter in the Stoical rules of life.  The Romans classified their
gods carefully in their order of precedence, analysed their
genealogies in the laborious spirit of modern heraldry, fenced them
round with a ritual as intricate as their law, but never quite
cared enough about them to believe in them.  So it was of no
account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva was
merely memory.  She had never been much else.  Nor did they protest
when Lucretius dared to say of Ceres and of Liber that they were
only the corn of the field and the fruit of the vine.  For they had
never mourned for the daughter of Demeter in the asphodel meadows
of Sicily, nor traversed the glades of Cithaeron with fawn-skin and
with spear.

This brief sketch of the condition of Roman thought will serve to
prepare us for the almost total want of scientific historical
criticism which we shall discern in their literature, and has,
besides, afforded fresh corroboration of the conditions essential
to the rise of this spirit, and of the modes of thought which it
reflects and in which it is always to be found.  Roman historical
composition had its origin in the pontifical college of
ecclesiastical lawyers, and preserved to its close the uncritical
spirit which characterised its fountain-head.  It possessed from
the outset a most voluminous collection of the materials of
history, which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not
historians.  It is so hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate
them.

Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt
on little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses
of the sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the
instruction of his child, to which he gave the name of Origines,
and before his time some aristocratic families had written
histories in Greek much in the same spirit in which the Germans of
the eighteenth century used French as the literary language.  But
the first regular Roman historian is Sallust.  Between the
extravagant eulogies passed on this author by the French (such as
De Closset), and Dr. Mommsen's view of him as merely a political
pamphleteer, it is perhaps difficult to reach the VIA MEDIA of
unbiassed appreciation.  He has, at any rate, the credit of being a
purely rationalistic historian, perhaps the only one in Roman
literature.  Cicero had a good many qualifications for a scientific
historian, and (as he usually did) thought very highly of his own
powers.  On passages of ancient legend, however, he is rather
unsatisfactory, for while he is too sensible to believe them he is
too patriotic to reject them.  And this is really the attitude of
Livy, who claims for early Roman legend a certain uncritical homage
from the rest of the subject world.  His view in his history is
that it is not worth while to examine the truth of these stories.

In his hands the history of Rome unrolls before our eyes like some
gorgeous tapestry, where victory succeeds victory, where triumph
treads on the heels of triumph, and the line of heroes seems never
to end.  It is not till we pass behind the canvas and see the
slight means by which the effect is produced that we apprehend the
fact that like most picturesque writers Livy is an indifferent
critic.  As regards his attitude towards the credibility of early
Roman history he is quite as conscious as we are of its mythical
and unsound nature.  He will not, for instance, decide whether the
Horatii were Albans or Romans; who was the first dictator; how many
tribunes there were, and the like.  His method, as a rule, is
merely to mention all the accounts and sometimes to decide in
favour of the most probable, but usually not to decide at all.  No
canons of historical criticism will ever discover whether the Roman
women interviewed the mother of Coriolanus of their own accord or
at the suggestion of the senate; whether Remus was killed for
jumping over his brother's wall or because they quarrelled about
birds; whether the ambassadors found Cincinnatus ploughing or only
mending a hedge.  Livy suspends his judgment over these important
facts and history when questioned on their truth is dumb.  If he
does select between two historians he chooses the one who is nearer
to the facts he describes.  But he is no critic, only a
conscientious writer.  It is mere vain waste to dwell on his
critical powers, for they do not exist.

In the case of Tacitus imagination has taken the place of history.
The past lives again in his pages, but through no laborious
criticism; rather through a dramatic and psychological faculty
which he specially possessed.

In the philosophy of history he has no belief.  He can never make
up his mind what to believe as regards God's government of the
world.  There is no method in him and none elsewhere in Roman
literature.

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions.
And the function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is
statical in our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend
into one elemental creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of
Semite.  Italy was not a pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a
motive power in the evolution of thought.  The owl of the goddess
of Wisdom traversed over the whole land and found nowhere a
resting-place.  The dove, which is the bird of Christ, flew
straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began.  It was the
fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval costume
the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which
was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve
to us as an allegory.  For it was in vain that the Middle Ages
strove to guard the buried spirit of progress.  When the dawn of
the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes
laid aside.  Humanity had risen from the dead.

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth of
criticism, comparison and research.  At the opening of that
education of modern by ancient thought which we call the
Renaissance, it was the words of Aristotle which sent Columbus
sailing to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy
set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has
revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe.
Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to
Greek modes of thought.  The monkish hymns which obscured the pages
of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new
method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of
mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of
glad adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new
vitality, when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind
apprehends what was beforetime hidden from it.  To herald the
opening of the sixteenth century, from the little Venetian printing
press came forth all the great authors of antiquity, each bearing
on the title-page the words [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous
prescience Polybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the
material sovereignty of Roman institutions and exemplified in
himself the intellectual empire of Greece.

The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has
not been a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought
now antiquated and of no account.  The only spirit which is
entirely removed from us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is
essentially modern.  The introduction of the comparative method of
research which has forced history to disclose its secrets belongs
in a measure to us.  Ours, too, is a more scientific knowledge of
philology and the method of survival.  Nor did the ancients know
anything of the doctrine of averages or of crucial instances, both
of which methods have proved of such importance in modern
criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the statical
elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all
physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the
single instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a
whole new science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back
to a time when man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and
the woolly rhinoceros.  But, except these, we have added no new
canon or method to the science of historical criticism.  Across the
drear waste of a thousand years the Greek and the modern spirit
join hands.

In the torch race which the Greek boys ran from the Cerameician
field of death to the home of the goddess of Wisdom, not merely he
who first reached the goal but he also who first started with the
torch aflame received a prize.  In the Lampadephoria of
civilisation and free thought let us not forget to render due meed
of honour to those who first lit that sacred flame, the increasing
splendour of which lights our footsteps to the far-off divine event
of the attainment of perfect truth.




THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART




AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty
of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in
terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in
its special manifestations.  So, in the lecture which I have the
honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any
abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it
as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -
still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is
incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
to you the general ideas which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as
that is possible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of
new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance
of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and
comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive
attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new
forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments:  and I
call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent
expression of beauty.

It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought,
and again as a mere revival of mediaeval feeling.  Rather I would
say that to these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever
of artistic value the intricacy and complexity and experience of
modern life can give:  taking from the one its clearness of vision
and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of expression
and the mystery of its vision.  For what, as Goethe said, is the
study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is
what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediaevalism but
individuality?

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its
sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the
adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of
the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century
in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang
the beautiful boy Euphorion.

Such expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true,
often apt to become the mere catchwords of schools.  We must always
remember that art has only one sentence to utter:  there is for her
only one high law, the law of form or harmony - yet between the
classical and romantic spirit we may say that there lies this
difference at least, that the one deals with the type and the other
with the exception.  In the work produced under the modern romantic
spirit it is no longer the permanent, the essential truths of life
that are treated of; it is the momentary situation of the one, the
momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to render.  In
sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject
predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of
the other, the situation predominates over the subject.

There are two spirits, then:  the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of
romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our
conscious intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of
taste.  As regards their origin, in art as in politics there is but
one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a
nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of
expression.  Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and
intellectual spirit which presides over our English Renaissance,
any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the progress and
movement and social life of the age that has produced it would be
to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true
meaning.  And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do
with art and the love of art, we must take into account many great
events of history which seem to be the most opposed to any such
artistic feeling.

Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh
voice of a rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must
seem, in its passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion
to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French
Revolution that we must look for the most primary factor of its
production, the first condition of its birth:  that great
Revolution of which we are all the children though the voices of
some of us be often loud against it; that Revolution to which at a
time when even such spirits as Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart
in England, noble messages of love blown across seas came from your
young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has
shown us that neither in politics nor in nature are there
revolutions ever but evolutions only, and that the prelude to that
wild storm which swept over France in 1789 and made every king in
Europe tremble for his throne, was first sounded in literature
years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken.  The way
for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical
spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring all
things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the
discontent of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that
followed the life of Emile and of Werther.  For Rousseau, by silent
lake and mountain, had called humanity back to the golden age that
still lies before us and preached a return to nature, in passionate
eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen northern air.
And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the prison
she had lain in for so many centuries - and what is romance but
humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and
terror of that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the
artistic Renaissance bent to her own service when the time came - a
scientific tendency first, which has borne in our own day a brood
of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in the sphere of poetry has not been
unproductive of good.  I do not mean merely in its adding to
enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that
more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he
said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression
in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form
of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration.  Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion
and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first
and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence
on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the
sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the
characteristics of the real artist.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William
Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary
line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and
sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and
bungling.  'Great inventors in all ages knew this - Michael Angelo
and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and another
time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century
prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.'

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision,
this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great
work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante,
of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus.  It lies
at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to
the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century
poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague
spiritualities of the German sentimental school:  opposed, too, to
that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower
itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned
contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle-
like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy,
though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day,
bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to
Oxford, the school of Emerson to America.  Yet is this spirit of
transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art.  For the artist can
accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself.  For him
there is no escape from the bondage of the earth:  there is not
even the desire of escape.

He is indeed the only true realist:  symbolism, which is the
essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him.  The
metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous,
many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that
work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most
clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.

'The storm of revolution,' as Andre Chenier said, 'blows out the
torch of poetry.'  It is not for some little time that the real
influence of such a wild cataclysm of things is felt:  at first the
desire for equality seems to have produced personalities of more
giant and Titan stature than the world had ever known before.  Men
heard the lyre of Byron and the legions of Napoleon; it was a
period of measureless passions and of measureless despair;
ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and art; the age was
an age of revolt:  a phase through which the human spirit must
pass, but one in which it cannot rest.  For the aim of culture is
not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies
clash by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the
gods have assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear,
untroubled air.

And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the
Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and
flawless realisation.

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in
Homer:  Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and
intensity of Italian painting:  the modern love of landscape dates
from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning
of the artistic renaissance of England.

Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and
clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring
sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the
imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner
of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement
of which I am to speak.

Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lofty, spiritual
mission, and had striven to raise design to the ideal level of
poetry and music, but the remoteness of his vision both in painting
and poetry and the incompleteness of his technical powers had been
adverse to any real influence.  It is in Keats that the artistic
spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation.

And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they?  If you ask nine-tenths
of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics,
they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German
for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will
hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort
of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the
chief objects of art.  To know nothing about their great men is one
of the necessary elements of English education.

As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough.  In the
year 1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters,
passionate admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of
meeting together for discussions on art, the result of such
discussions being that the English Philistine public was roused
suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its
midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise
English painting and poetry.  They called themselves the pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce
any serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and
besides this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - among whom the names
of Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you
- had on their side three things that the English public never
forgives:  youth, power and enthusiasm.

Satire, always as sterile as it in shameful and as impotent as it
is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to
genius - doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public,
blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence
which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but
harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect
rightness of his work and ambition.  For to disagree with three-
fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first
elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments
of spiritual doubt.

As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of
English art, we may see at the base of their artistic creations a
desire for a deeper spiritual value to be given to art as well as a
more decorative value.

Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the
early Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to
the facile abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism
of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, a vision at
once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate
and more intense.

For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the
aesthetic demands of its age:  there must be also about it, if it
is to affect us with any permanent delight, the impress of a
distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that of
ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a certain
newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very
strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.

LA PERSONNALITE, said one of the greatest of modem French critics,
VOILE CE QUI NOUS SAUVERA.

But above all things was it a return to Nature - that formula which
seems to suit so many and such diverse movements:  they would draw
and paint nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine
things as they really happened.  Later there came to the old house
by Blackfriars Bridge, where this young brotherhood used to meet
and work, two young men from Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones and William
Morris - the latter substituting for the simpler realism of the
early days a more exquisite spirit of choice, a more faultless
devotion to beauty, a more intense seeking for perfection:  a
master of all exquisite design and of all spiritual vision.  It is
of the school of Florence rather than of that of Venice that he is
kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of Nature is a disturbing
element in imaginative art.  The visible aspect of modern life
disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that
is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend.  To Morris we
owe poetry whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision
has not been excelled in the literature of our country, and by the
revival of the decorative arts he has given to our individualised
romantic movement the social idea and the social factor also.

But the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with
Ruskin's faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one
of ideas merely but of execution, not one of conceptions but of
creations.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the
arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in
feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and
specially.  The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines
of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of
Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified
vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to
which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard
porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain.
The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of
the new oil medium for painting.  The progress in modern music has
been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no
way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of
any wider social aim.  The critic may try and trace the deferred
resolutions of Beethoven to some sense of the incompleteness of the
modern intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as
one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave
us at peace.'

And so it is in poetry also:  all this love of curious French
metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this
increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious
words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and
Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and
trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the
poet may blow the music of their many messages.

And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours:  it is a
reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax
execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the
work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater
splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than
English imaginative art has shown before.  In Rossetti's poetry and
the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision
and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking
for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness
of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which
is merely intellectual.  In this respect they are one with the
romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic
note was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to
read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a
poet's reading.

While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated
and discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal
qualities of its own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic
sense and not needing for their aesthetic effect any lofty
intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or even any
passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the
poet's working - what people call his inspiration - have not
escaped the controlling influence of the artistic spirit.  Not that
the imagination has lost its wings, but we have accustomed
ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate their
limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.

To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production,
and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness
in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination.  We find it in
the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle.  We
find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of
such men as Leonardo da Vinci.  Schiller tried to adjust the
balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the
position of self-consciousness in art.  Wordsworth's definition of
poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an
analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work
has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without
this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to
substitute for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,'
we may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that
artistic life.  The question made an early and strange appearance
in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the
young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and
stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own
imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative work which
we know by the name of THE RAVEN.

In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had
intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to
poetry, it was against the claims of the understanding that an
artist like Goethe had to protest.  'The more incomprehensible to
the understanding a poem is the better for it,' he said once,
asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of
reason in prose.  But in this century it is rather against the
claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and
feeling, that the artist must react.  The simple utterance of joy
is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain, and the
real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find
their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some
artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the
farthest removed and the most alien.

'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains
poetry,' says Charles Baudelaire.  This too was the lesson that
Theophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most
fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching -
'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.'  The absolute
distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so
much as his power of rendering it.  The entire subordination of all
intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing
poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our
Renaissance.

We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful
and technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as
opposed to subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in
dealing with his subject.  And now I would point out to you its
operation in the choice of subject.  The recognition of a separate
realm for the artist, a consciousness of the absolute difference
between the world of art and the world of real fact, between
classic grace and absolute reality, forms not merely the essential
element of any aesthetic charm but is the characteristic of all
great imaginative work and of all great eras of artistic creation -
of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of the age
of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of
the day:  rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us
that which we desire.  For to most of us the real life is the life
we do not lead, and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its
own perfection, more jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is
less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept the passion of
creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.

The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will
not be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the
philosopher of the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of
all time and of all existence.  For him no form is obsolete, no
subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world
has known, in desert of Judaea or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers
of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous
streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ways of Camelot - all
lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with
beautiful life.  He will take of it what is salutary for his own
spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others with the
calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of
beauty.

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all
things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry.  Into the
secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit
nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain,
nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue.  He can
steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social
problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and
bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these
subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left
hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric.
This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:
Wordsworth had it not.  In the work of both these men there is much
that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of
calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine,
imaginative work.  But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate,
and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and
faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and
the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note.

It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a
clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to
placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus.
Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended;
the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry.  For
art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute
truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr.
Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more
actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and
interesting as a type and figure but more positive and real.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal
considerations are no principle at all.  For to the poet all times
and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and
eternally the same:  no theme is inept, no past or present
preferable.  The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes
of Arcadia weary him:  for him there is but one time, the artistic
moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of
Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world and yet more
sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which
dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not
from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm
which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only.  And so
it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he
who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is
accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity
which makes life obscure to us.'

Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of
ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the
secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and
glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome - do they not tell us
more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of
Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors
and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of
the history of Holland?

And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the
nineteenth century - the democratic and pantheistic tendency and
the tendency to value life for the sake of art - found their most
complete and perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats
who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers
in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things.  And I
remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science,
his saying to me, 'the more materialistic science becomes, the more
angels shall I paint:  their wings are my protest in favour of the
immortality of the soul.'

But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art.
Where in the arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human
sympathy which is the condition of all noble work; where in the
arts are we to look for what Mazzini would call the social ideas as
opposed to the merely personal ideas?  By virtue of what claim do I
demand for the artist the love and loyalty of the men and women of
the world?  I think I can answer that.

Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter
for his own soul.  He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or
peace like Angelico; he may come with mourning like the great
Athenian or with mirth like the singer of Sicily; nor is it for us
to do aught but accept his teaching, knowing that we cannot smite
the bitter lips of Leopardi into laughter or burden with our
discontent Goethe's serene calm.  But for warrant of its truth such
message must have the flame of eloquence in the lips that speak it,
splendour and glory in the vision that is its witness, being
justified by one thing only - the flawless beauty and perfect form
of its expression:  this indeed being the social idea, being the
meaning of joy in art.

Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace
where there is no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the
pictorial charm only, the wonder of its colour, the satisfying
beauty of its design.

You have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of
Rubens which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and
wonderful pageant of horse and rider arrested in its most exquisite
and fiery moment when the winds are caught in crimson banner and
the air lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume.  Well,
that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the
wounded feet of Christ and it is for the death of the Son of Man
that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.

But this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not
receptive enough of the sensuous element of art; and so the real
influence of the arts is hidden from many of us:  only a few,
escaping from the tyranny of the soul, have learned the secret of
those high hours when thought is not.

And this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is
having on us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese
work.  While the Western world has been laying on art the
intolerable burden of its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual
tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept true to art's
primary and pictorial conditions.

In judging of a beautiful statue the aesthetic faculty is
absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those
marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of
those limbs that are powerless to help us.  In its primary aspect a
painting has no more spiritual message or meaning than an exquisite
fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus:  it is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more.  The
channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should
touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life,
nor metaphysical truths.  But that pictorial charm which does not
depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one hand,
nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the
other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of
colour.  Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of
Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything
definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in
workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the
Greeks would say) an end in itself.

And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry,
comes never from the subject but from an inventive handling of
rhythmical language, from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of
verse.'  The element of song in the singing accompanied by the
profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the incomplete
lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-
crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our
delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like
Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks
it will break in music.

And health in art - what is that?  It has nothing to do with a sane
criticism of life.  There is more health in Baudelaire than there
is in [Kingsley].  Health is the artist's recognition of the
limitations of the form in which he works.  It is the honour and
the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be
language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories
- knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in
their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each
of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its
objective limits, the same unique artistic delight.  The delight is
like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form
and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be
separated from the method of its expression, the art which most
completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to
which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

And criticism - what place is that to have in our culture?  Well, I
think that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at
all times, and upon all subjects:  C'EST UN GRAND AVANTAGE DE
N'AVOIR RIEN FAIT, MAIS IL NE FAUT PAS EN ABUSER.

It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any
knowledge of the quality of created things.  You have listened to
PATIENCE for a hundred nights and you have heard me for one only.
It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing
something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of
aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert.  As little should you
judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that
dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take
your critic for any sane test of art.  For the artists, like the
Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as Emerson says
somewhere; their real value and place time only can show.  In this
respect also omnipotence is with the ages.  The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only.  His work lies
with them.  Art can never have any other claim but her own
perfection:  it is for the critic to create for art the social aim,
too, by teaching the people the spirit in which they are to
approach all artistic work, the love they are to give it, the
lesson they are to draw from it.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern
progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for
the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,'
are appeals which should be made to the public.  The art which has
fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions:
it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of
such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions.
'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great
men and the principle of Beauty.'

Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and
underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and
wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities,
yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the
decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness
and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not
complete.  For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful
national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed
that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the
commercial spirit of England has killed that too.

It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the
burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with
the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the
chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile
Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A
DISPARU.

Nor is it again that the novel has killed the play, as some critics
would persuade us - the romantic movement of France shows us that.
The work of Balzac and of Hugo grew up side by side together; nay,
more, were complementary to each other, though neither of them saw
it.  While all other forms of poetry may flourish in an ignoble
age, the splendid individualism of the lyrist, fed by its own
passion, and lit by its own power, may pass as a pillar of fire as
well across the desert as across places that are pleasant.  It is
none the less glorious though no man follow it - nay, by the
greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into
loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song.  From the mean
squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the
idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with
fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun
and Bassarid dance there no more.  Like Keats he may wander through
the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the
galley's deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since
passed away.  But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life;
it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social
man, with man in his relation to God and to Humanity.  It is the
product of a period of great national united energy; it is
impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the
age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of
such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the
defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of
the Armada of Spain.

Shelley felt how incomplete our movement was in this respect, and
has shown in one great tragedy by what terror and pity he would
have purified our age; but in spite of THE CENCI the drama is one
of the artistic forms through which the genius of the England of
this century seeks in vain to find outlet and expression.  He has
had no worthy imitators.

It is rather, perhaps, to you that we should turn to complete and
perfect this great movement of ours, for there is something
Hellenic in your air and world, something that has a quicker breath
of the joy and power of Elizabeth's England about it than our
ancient civilisation can give us.  For you, at least, are young;
'no hungry generations tread you down,' and the past does not weary
you with the intolerable burden of its memories nor mock you with
the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you have lost.
That very absence of tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought would rob
your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light, may
be rather the source of your freedom and your strength.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance
of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the
sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, has been
defined by one of your poets as a flawless triumph of art.  It is a
triumph which you above all nations may be destined to achieve.
For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not
the chosen music of Liberty only; other messages are there in the
wonder of wind-swept height and the majesty of silent deep -
messages that, if you will but listen to them, may yield you the
splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some new beauty.

'I foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all
people may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its
foundation.'  If, then, this is so, and if the materials for a
civilisation as great as that of Europe lie all around you, what
profit, you will ask me, will all this study of our poets and
painters be to you?  I might answer that the intellect can be
engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic and
historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to
feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or
women can cease to be a fit subject for culture.

I might remind you of what all Europe owes to the sorrow of a
single Florentine in exile at Verona, or to the love of Petrarch by
that little well in Southern France; nay, more, how even in this
dull, materialistic age the simple expression of an old man's
simple life, passed away from the clamour of great cities amid the
lakes and misty hills of Cumberland, has opened out for England
treasures of new joy compared with which the treasures of her
luxury are as barren as the sea which she has made her highway, and
as bitter as the fire which she would make her slave.

But I think it will bring you something besides this, something
that is the knowledge of real strength in art:  not that you should
imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their
artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that.

For in nations, as in individuals, if the passion for creation be
not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it
will be sure to waste its strength aimlessly, failing perhaps in
the artistic spirit of choice, or in the mistaking of feeling for
form, or in the following of false ideals.

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural
affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the
qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its
powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before
us.  It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral
supervision that your literature needs.  Indeed, one should never
talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written
or badly written, that is all.  And, indeed, any element of morals
or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often
a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of
discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good
work aims at a purely artistic effect.  'We must be careful,' said
Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is
obviously moral.  Everything that is great promotes civilisation as
soon as we are aware of it.'

But, as in your cities so in your literature, it is a permanent
canon and standard of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if
I may say so) that is lacking.  All noble work is not national
merely, but universal.  The political independence of a nation must
not be confused with any intellectual isolation.  The spiritual
freedom, indeed, your own generous lives and liberal air will give
you.  From us you will learn the classical restraint of form.

For all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to
do with strength, and harshness very little to do with power.  'The
artist,' as Mr. Swinburne says, 'must be perfectly articulate.'

This limitation is for the artist perfect freedom:  it is at once
the origin and the sign of his strength.  So that all the supreme
masters of style - Dante, Sophocles, Shakespeare - are the supreme
masters of spiritual and intellectual vision also.

Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will
be added to you.

This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is
the test of all great civilised nations.  Philosophy may teach us
to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and
science resolve the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art
is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a
speculation, art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.

For beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm.  Philosophies
fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the
withered leaves of autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all
seasons and a possession for all eternity.

Wars and the clash of armies and the meeting of men in battle by
trampled field or leaguered city, and the rising of nations there
must always be.  But I think that art, by creating a common
intellectual atmosphere between all countries, might - if it could
not overshadow the world with the silver wings of peace - at least
make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one
another for the whim or folly of some king or minister, as they do
in Europe.  Fraternity would come no more with the hands of Cain,
nor Liberty betray freedom with the kiss of Anarchy; for national
hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.

'How could I?' said Goethe, when reproached for not writing like
Korner against the French.  'How could I, to whom barbarism and
culture alone are of importance, hate a nation which is among the
most cultivated of the earth, a nation to which I owe a great part
of my own cultivation?'

Mighty empires, too, there must always be as long as personal
ambition and the spirit of the age are one, but art at least is the
only empire which a nation's enemies cannot take from her by
conquest, but which is taken by submission only.  The sovereignty
of Greece and Rome is not yet passed away, though the gods of the
one be dead and the eagles of the other tired.

And we in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that
will still be England's when her yellow leopards have grown weary
of wars and the rose of her shield is crimsoned no more with the
blood of battle; and you, too, absorbing into the generous heart of
a great people this pervading artistic spirit, will create for
yourselves such riches as you have never yet created, though your
land be a network of railways and your cities the harbours for the
galleys of the world.

I know, indeed, that the divine natural prescience of beauty which
is the inalienable inheritance of Greek and Italian is not our
inheritance.  For such an informing and presiding spirit of art to
shield us from all harsh and alien influences, we of the Northern
races must turn rather to that strained self-consciousness of our
age which, as it is the key-note of all our romantic art, must be
the source of all or nearly all our culture.  I mean that
intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always
looking for the secret of the life that still lingers round old and
bygone forms of culture.  It takes from each what is serviceable
for the modern spirit - from Athens its wonder without its worship,
from Venice its splendour without its sin.  The same spirit is
always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting
what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and
to the palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of
Proserpine.

And yet the truths of art cannot be taught:  they are revealed
only, revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of
all beautiful impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful
things.  And hence the enormous importance given to the decorative
arts in our English Renaissance; hence all that marvel of design
that comes from the hand of Edward Burne-Jones, all that weaving of
tapestry and staining of glass, that beautiful working in clay and
metal and wood which we owe to William Morris, the greatest
handicraftsman we have had in England since the fourteenth century.

So, in years to come there will be nothing in any man's house which
has not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its
user.  The children, like the children of Plato's perfect city,
will grow up 'in a simple atmosphere of all fair things' - I quote
from the passage in the REPUBLIC - 'a simple atmosphere of all fair
things, where beauty, which is the spirit of art, will come on eye
and ear like a fresh breath of wind that brings health from a clear
upland, and insensibly and gradually draw the child's soul into
harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so that he will love
what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly (for
they always go together) long before he knows the reason why; and
then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as a friend.'

That is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation,
feeling that the secret not of philosophy merely but of all
gracious existence might be externally hidden from any one whose
youth had been passed in uncomely and vulgar surroundings, and that
the beauty of form and colour even, as he says, in the meanest
vessels of the house, will find its way into the inmost places of
the soul and lead the boy naturally to look for that divine harmony
of spiritual life of which art was to him the material symbol and
warrant.

Prelude indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of
beautiful things be for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes
a burden and knowledge is one with sorrow:  for as every body has
its shadow so every soul has its scepticism.  In such dread moments
of discord and despair where should we, of this torn and troubled
age, turn our steps if not to that secure house of beauty where
there is always a little forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that
CITTE DIVINA, as the old Italian heresy called it, the divine city
where one can stand, though only for a brief moment, apart from the
division and terror of the world and the choice of the world too?

This is that CONSOLATION DES ARTS which is the key-note of
Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed - as
indeed what in our century is not? - by Goethe.  You remember what
he said to the German people:  'Only have the courage,' he said,
'to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be
delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something
great.'  The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions:
yes, that is the secret of the artistic life - for while art has
been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an
escape rather from the tyranny of the soul.  But only to those who
worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true
treasure:  else will she be as powerless to aid you as the
mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical
nature of Heine.

And indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that
might follow if we had about us only what gave pleasure to the
maker of it and gives pleasure to its user, that being the simplest
of all rules about decoration.  One thing, at least, I think it
would do for us:  there is no surer test of a great country than
how near it stands to its own poets; but between the singers of our
day and the workers to whom they would sing there seems to be an
ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which slander and mockery
cannot traverse, but which is spanned by the luminous wings of
love.

And of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of
noble imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation.  I
do not mean merely as regards that direct literary expression of
art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a
Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the
strength of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen,
long before he stood and listened in crowded market-place or in
theatre of marble; or by which an Italian child of the fifteenth
century could know of the chastity of Lucrece and the death of
Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest.  For the good
we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become
through it.  Its real influence will be in giving the mind that
enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to
demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of
common life for us - whether it be by giving the most spiritual
interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most
sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed
from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination
for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things.
For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all,
and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all.

I will not dwell here on what I am sure has delighted you all in
our great Gothic cathedrals.  I mean how the artist of that time,
handicraftsman himself in stone or glass, found the best motives
for his art, always ready for his hand and always beautiful, in the
daily work of the artificers he saw around him - as in those lovely
windows of Chartres - where the dyer dips in the vat and the potter
sits at the wheel, and the weaver stands at the loom:  real
manufacturers these, workers with the hand, and entirely delightful
to look at, not like the smug and vapid shopman of our time, who
knows nothing of the web or vase he sells, except that he is
charging you double its value and thinking you a fool for buying
it.  Nor can I but just note, in passing, the immense influence the
decorative work of Greece and Italy had on its artists, the one
teaching the sculptor that restraining influence of design which is
the glory of the Parthenon, the other keeping painting always true
to its primary, pictorial condition of noble colour which is the
secret of the school of Venice; for I wish rather, in this lecture
at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human
life - on its social not its purely artistic effect.

There are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two
different forms of natures:  men to whom the end of life is action,
and men to whom the end of life is thought.  As regards the latter,
who seek for experience itself and not for the fruits of
experience, who must burn always with one of the passions of this
fiery-coloured world, who find life interesting not for its secret
but for its situations, for its pulsations and not for its purpose;
the passion for beauty engendered by the decorative arts will be to
them more satisfying than any political or religious enthusiasm,
any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow for love.  For
art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but the
highest quality to one's moments, and for those moments' sake.  So
far for those to whom the end of life is thought.  As regards the
others, who hold that life is inseparable from labour, to them
should this movement be specially dear:  for, if our days are
barren without industry, industry without art is barbarism.

Hewers of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed
among us.  Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour
of man after all:  but at least let the pitcher that stands by the
well be beautiful and surely the labour of the day will be
lightened:  let the wood be made receptive of some lovely form,
some gracious design, and there will come no longer discontent but
joy to the toiler.  For what is decoration but the worker's
expression of joy in his work?  And not joy merely - that is a
great thing yet not enough - but that opportunity of expressing his
own individuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the
source of all art.  'I have tried,' I remember William Morris
saying to me once, 'I have tried to make each of my workers an
artist, and when I say an artist I mean a man.'  For the worker
then, handicraftsman of whatever kind he is, art is no longer to be
a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over the whitened body of
a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of his luxury, but
rather the beautiful and noble expression of a life that has in it
something beautiful and noble.

And so you must seek out your workman and give him, as far as
possible, the right surroundings, for remember that the real test
and virtue of a workman is not his earnestness nor his industry
even, but his power of design merely; and that 'design is not the
offspring of idle fancy:  it is the studied result of accumulative
observation and delightful habit.'  All the teaching in the world
is of no avail if you do not surround your workman with happy
influences and with beautiful things.  It is impossible for him to
have right ideas about colour unless he sees the lovely colours of
Nature unspoiled; impossible for him to supply beautiful incident
and action unless he sees beautiful incident and action in the
world about him.

For to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and
thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among
beautiful things and looking at them.  'The steel of Toledo and the
silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and lustre to
pride,' as Mr. Ruskin says; let it be for you to create an art that
is made by the hands of the people for the joy of the people, to
please the hearts of the people, too; an art that will be your
expression of your delight in life.  There is nothing 'in common
life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your
touch'; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.

You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected
with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you,
erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men.  Well, let
me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in
spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable
fashion at all.  It is because these two lovely flowers are in
England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally
adapted for decorative art - the gaudy leonine beauty of the one
and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the
most entire and perfect joy.  And so with you:  let there be no
flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around
your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not
lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier
that does not live for ever in carven arch or window or marble, no
bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its
colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more
precious the preciousness of simple adornment.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of
life.  Well, the secret of life is in art.




HOUSE DECORATION




IN my last lecture I gave you something of the history of Art in
England.  I sought to trace the influence of the French Revolution
upon its development.  I said something of the song of Keats and
the school of the pre-Raphaelites.  But I do not want to shelter
the movement, which I have called the English Renaissance, under
any palladium however noble, or any name however revered.  The
roots of it have, indeed, to be sought for in things that have long
passed away, and not, as some suppose, in the fancy of a few young
men - although I am not altogether sure that there is anything much
better than the fancy of a few young men.

When I appeared before you on a previous occasion, I had seen
nothing of American art save the Doric columns and Corinthian
chimney-pots visible on your Broadway and Fifth Avenue.  Since
then, I have been through your country to some fifty or sixty
different cities, I think.  I find that what your people need is
not so much high imaginative art but that which hallows the vessels
of everyday use.  I suppose that the poet will sing and the artist
will paint regardless whether the world praises or blames.  He has
his own world and is independent of his fellow-men.  But the
handicraftsman is dependent on your pleasure and opinion.  He needs
your encouragement and he must have beautiful surroundings.  Your
people love art but do not sufficiently honour the handicraftsman.
Of course, those millionaires who can pillage Europe for their
pleasure need have no care to encourage such; but I speak for those
whose desire for beautiful things is larger than their means.  I
find that one great trouble all over is that your workmen are not
given to noble designs.  You cannot be indifferent to this, because
Art is not something which you can take or leave.  It is a
necessity of human life.

And what is the meaning of this beautiful decoration which we call
art?  In the first place, it means value to the workman and it
means the pleasure which he must necessarily take in making a
beautiful thing.  The mark of all good art is not that the thing
done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but
that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.  I
cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational
designs are necessary in all work.  I did not imagine, until I went
into some of your simpler cities, that there was so much bad work
done.  I found, where I went, bad wall-papers horribly designed,
and coloured carpets, and that old offender the horse-hair sofa,
whose stolid look of indifference is always so depressing.  I found
meaningless chandeliers and machine-made furniture, generally of
rosewood, which creaked dismally under the weight of the ubiquitous
interviewer.  I came across the small iron stove which they always
persist in decorating with machine-made ornaments, and which is as
great a bore as a wet day or any other particularly dreadful
institution.  When unusual extravagance was indulged in, it was
garnished with two funeral urns.

It must always be remembered that what is well and carefully made
by an honest workman, after a rational design, increases in beauty
and value as the years go on.  The old furniture brought over by
the Pilgrims, two hundred years ago, which I saw in New England, is
just as good and as beautiful to-day as it was when it first came
here.  Now, what you must do is to bring artists and handicraftsmen
together.  Handicraftsmen cannot live, certainly cannot thrive,
without such companionship.  Separate these two and you rob art of
all spiritual motive.

Having done this, you must place your workman in the midst of
beautiful surroundings.  The artist is not dependent on the visible
and the tangible.  He has his visions and his dreams to feed on.
But the workman must see lovely forms as he goes to his work in the
morning and returns at eventide.  And, in connection with this, I
want to assure you that noble and beautiful designs are never the
result of idle fancy or purposeless day-dreaming.  They come only
as the accumulation of habits of long and delightful observation.
And yet such things may not be taught.  Right ideas concerning them
can certainly be obtained only by those who have been accustomed to
rooms that are beautiful and colours that are satisfying.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose
a notable and joyous dress for men.  There would be more joy in
life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful
colours we can in fashioning our own clothes.  The dress of the
future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound
with joyous colour.  At present we have lost all nobility of dress
and, in doing so, have almost annihilated the modern sculptor.
And, in looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one
could almost wish that we had completely killed the noble art.  To
see the frock-coat of the drawing-room done in bronze, or the
double waistcoat perpetuated in marble, adds a new horror to death.
But indeed, in looking through the history of costume, seeking an
answer to the questions we have propounded, there is little that is
either beautiful or appropriate.  One of the earliest forms is the
Greek drapery which is exquisite for young girls.  And then, I
think we may be pardoned a little enthusiasm over the dress of the
time of Charles I., so beautiful indeed, that in spite of its
invention being with the Cavaliers it was copied by the Puritans.
And the dress for the children of that time must not be passed
over.  It was a very golden age of the little ones.  I do not think
that they have ever looked so lovely as they do in the pictures of
that time.  The dress of the last century in England is also
peculiarly gracious and graceful.  There is nothing bizarre or
strange about it, but it is full of harmony and beauty.  In these
days, when we have suffered dreadfully from the incursions of the
modern milliner, we hear ladies boast that they do not wear a dress
more than once.  In the old days, when the dresses were decorated
with beautiful designs and worked with exquisite embroidery, ladies
rather took a pride in bringing out the garment and wearing it many
times and handing it down to their daughters - a process that
would, I think, be quite appreciated by a modern husband when
called upon to settle his wife's bills.

And how shall men dress?  Men say that they do not particularly
care how they dress, and that it is little matter.  I am bound to
reply that I do not think that you do.  In all my journeys through
the country, the only well-dressed men that I saw - and in saying
this I earnestly deprecate the polished indignation of your Fifth
Avenue dandies - were the Western miners.  Their wide-brimmed hats,
which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the
rain, and the cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of
drapery ever invented, may well be dwelt on with admiration.  Their
high boots, too, were sensible and practical.  They wore only what
was comfortable, and therefore beautiful.  As I looked at them I
could not help thinking with regret of the time when these
picturesque miners would have made their fortunes and would go East
to assume again all the abominations of modern fashionable attire.
Indeed, so concerned was I that I made some of them promise that
when they again appeared in the more crowded scenes of Eastern
civilisation they would still continue to wear their lovely
costume.  But I do not believe they will.

Now, what America wants to-day is a school of rational art.  Bad
art is a great deal worse than no art at all.  You must show your
workmen specimens of good work so that they come to know what is
simple and true and beautiful.  To that end I would have you have a
museum attached to these schools - not one of those dreadful modern
institutions where there is a stuffed and very dusty giraffe, and a
case or two of fossils, but a place where there are gathered
examples of art decoration from various periods and countries.
Such a place is the South Kensington Museum in London, whereon we
build greater hopes for the future than on any other one thing.
There I go every Saturday night, when the museum is open later than
usual, to see the handicraftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower
and the worker in metals.  And it is here that the man of
refinement and culture comes face to face with the workman who
ministers to his joy.  He comes to know more of the nobility of the
workman, and the workman, feeling the appreciation, comes to know
more of the nobility of his work.

You have too many white walls.  More colour is wanted.  You should
have such men as Whistler among you to teach you the beauty and joy
of colour.  Take Mr. Whistler's 'Symphony in White,' which you no
doubt have imagined to be something quite bizarre.  It is nothing
of the sort.  Think of a cool grey sky flecked here and there with
white clouds, a grey ocean and three wonderfully beautiful figures
robed in white, leaning over the water and dropping white flowers
from their fingers.  Here is no extensive intellectual scheme to
trouble you, and no metaphysics of which we have had quite enough
in art.  But if the simple and unaided colour strike the right
keynote, the whole conception is made clear.  I regard Mr.
Whistler's famous Peacock Room as the finest thing in colour and
art decoration which the world has known since Correggio painted
that wonderful room in Italy where the little children are dancing
on the walls.  Mr. Whistler finished another room just before I
came away - a breakfast room in blue and yellow.  The ceiling was a
light blue, the cabinet-work and the furniture were of a yellow
wood, the curtains at the windows were white and worked in yellow,
and when the table was set for breakfast with dainty blue china
nothing can be conceived at once so simple and so joyous.

The fault which I have observed in most of your rooms is that there
is apparent no definite scheme of colour.  Everything is not
attuned to a key-note as it should be.  The apartments are crowded
with pretty things which have no relation to one another.  Again,
your artists must decorate what is more simply useful.  In your art
schools I found no attempt to decorate such things as the vessels
for water.  I know of nothing uglier than the ordinary jug or
pitcher.  A museum could be filled with the different kinds of
water vessels which are used in hot countries.  Yet we continue to
submit to the depressing jug with the handle all on one side.  I do
not see the wisdom of decorating dinner-plates with sunsets and
soup-plates with moonlight scenes.  I do not think it adds anything
to the pleasure of the canvas-back duck to take it out of such
glories.  Besides, we do not want a soup-plate whose bottom seems
to vanish in the distance.  One feels neither safe nor comfortable
under such conditions.  In fact, I did not find in the art schools
of the country that the difference was explained between decorative
and imaginative art.

The conditions of art should be simple.  A great deal more depends
upon the heart than upon the head.  Appreciation of art is not
secured by any elaborate scheme of learning.  Art requires a good
healthy atmosphere.  The motives for art are still around about us
as they were round about the ancients.  And the subjects are also
easily found by the earnest sculptor and the painter.  Nothing is
more picturesque and graceful than a man at work.  The artist who
goes to the children's playground, watches them at their sport and
sees the boy stoop to tie his shoe, will find the same themes that
engaged the attention of the ancient Greeks, and such observation
and the illustrations which follow will do much to correct that
foolish impression that mental and physical beauty are always
divorced.

To you, more than perhaps to any other country, has Nature been
generous in furnishing material for art workers to work in.  You
have marble quarries where the stone is more beautiful in colour
than any the Greeks ever had for their beautiful work, and yet day
after day I am confronted with the great building of some stupid
man who has used the beautiful material as if it were not precious
almost beyond speech.  Marble should not be used save by noble
workmen.  There is nothing which gave me a greater sense of
barrenness in travelling through the country than the entire
absence of wood carving on your houses.  Wood carving is the
simplest of the decorative arts.  In Switzerland the little
barefooted boy beautifies the porch of his father's house with
examples of skill in this direction.  Why should not American boys
do a great deal more and better than Swiss boys?

There is nothing to my mind more coarse in conception and more
vulgar in execution than modern jewellery.  This is something that
can easily be corrected.  Something better should be made out of
the beautiful gold which is stored up in your mountain hollows and
strewn along your river beds.  When I was at Leadville and
reflected that all the shining silver that I saw coming from the
mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad.  It should
be made into something more permanent.  The golden gates at
Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them.

We should see more of the workman than we do.  We should not be
content to have the salesman stand between us - the salesman who
knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a
great deal too much for it.  And watching the workman will teach
that most important lesson - the nobility of all rational
workmanship.

I said in my last lecture that art would create a new brotherhood
among men by furnishing a universal language.  I said that under
its beneficent influences war might pass away.  Thinking this, what
place can I ascribe to art in our education?  If children grow up
among all fair and lovely things, they will grow to love beauty and
detest ugliness before they know the reason why.  If you go into a
house where everything is coarse, you find things chipped and
broken and unsightly.  Nobody exercises any care.  If everything is
dainty and delicate, gentleness and refinement of manner are
unconsciously acquired.  When I was in San Francisco I used to
visit the Chinese Quarter frequently.  There I used to watch a
great hulking Chinese workman at his task of digging, and used to
see him every day drink his tea from a little cup as delicate in
texture as the petal of a flower, whereas in all the grand hotels
of the land, where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great
gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my coffee or my
chocolate in cups an inch and a quarter thick.  I think I have
deserved something nicer.

The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who
looked upon human beings as obstructions.  They have tried to
educate boys' minds before they had any.  How much better it would
be in these early years to teach children to use their hands in the
rational service of mankind.  I would have a workshop attached to
every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple
decorative arts.  It would be a golden hour to the children.  And
you would soon raise up a race of handicraftsmen who would
transform the face of your country.  I have seen only one such
school in the United States, and this was in Philadelphia and was
founded by my friend Mr. Leyland.  I stopped there yesterday and
have brought some of the work here this afternoon to show you.
Here are two disks of beaten brass:  the designs on them are
beautiful, the workmanship is simple, and the entire result is
satisfactory.  The work was done by a little boy twelve years old.
This is a wooden bowl decorated by a little girl of thirteen.  The
design is lovely and the colouring delicate and pretty.  Here you
see a piece of beautiful wood carving accomplished by a little boy
of nine.  In such work as this, children learn sincerity in art.
They learn to abhor the liar in art - the man who paints wood to
look like iron, or iron to look like stone.  It is a practical
school of morals.  No better way is there to learn to love Nature
than to understand Art.  It dignifies every flower of the field.
And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing
becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw
the customary stone.  What we want is something spiritual added to
life.  Nothing is so ignoble that Art cannot sanctify it.




ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN




PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is
beautiful and what is useful.  There is no opposition to beauty
except ugliness:  all things are either beautiful or ugly, and
utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because
beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing,
because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you
put a thing to and the value placed on it.  No workman will
beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good
handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs.  You
should be quite sure of that.  If you have poor and worthless
designs in any craft or trade you will get poor and worthless
workmen only, but the minute you have noble and beautiful designs,
then you get men of power and intellect and feeling to work for
you.  By having good designs you have workmen who work not merely
with their hands but with their hearts and heads too; otherwise you
will get merely the fool or the loafer to work for you.

That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few
people would venture to assert.  And yet most civilised people act
as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves
and those that are to come after them.  For that beauty which is
meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can
take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live
as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be
less than men.

Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your
life and cities here is opposed to art.  Who built the beautiful
cities of the world but commercial men and commercial men only?
Genoa built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice,
most lovely of all, by its noble and honest merchants.

I do not wish you, remember, 'to build a new Pisa,' nor to bring
'the life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.'
'The circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are
those' of modern American life, 'because the designs you have now
to ask for from your workmen are such as will make modern' American
'life beautiful.'  The art we want is the art based on all the
inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of
nineteenth-century life.

Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery?  I tell
you we reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work,
when it relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it
seeks to do that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands
and hearts of men.  Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it
is all bad and worthless and ugly.  And let us not mistake the
means of civilisation for the end of civilisation; steam-engine,
telephone and the like, are all wonderful, but remember that their
value depends entirely on the noble uses we make of them, on the
noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things themselves.

It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the
Antipodes through a telephone; its advantage depends entirely on
the value of what the two men have to say to one another.  If one
merely shrieks slander through a tube and the other whispers folly
into a wire, do not think that anybody is very much benefited by
the invention.

The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the
rate of forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any
memory of that lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier
at Rome, or that he got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or
civilisation much good.  But that swift legion of fiery-footed
engines that bore to the burning ruins of Chicago the loving help
and generous treasure of the world was as noble and as beautiful as
any golden troop of angels that ever fed the hungry and clothed the
naked in the antique times.  As beautiful, yes; all machinery may
be beautiful when it is undecorated even.  Do not seek to decorate
it.  We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the
line of strength and the line of beauty being one.

Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright and
noble surroundings that you can yourself create.  Stately and
simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for
your men and women; those are the conditions of a real artistic
movement.  For the artist is not concerned primarily with any
theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness
that should come daily on eye and ear for a beautiful external
world.

But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour
gaudy.  For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the
colours that seem about to pass into one another's realm - colour
without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord.
Barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that
desecrate not merely your cities but every rock and river that I
have seen yet in America - all this is not enough.  A school of
design we must have too in each city.  It should be a stately and
noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the
world.  Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren
whitewashed room and bid them work in that depressing and
colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the American schools
of design, but give them beautiful surroundings.  Because you want
to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste in your workman,
he must have always by him and before him specimens of the best
decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him:  'This is
good work.  Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many years
ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.'  Work
in this spirit and you will be sure to be right.  Do not copy it,
but work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom
of imagination.  You must teach him colour and design, how all
beautiful colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the
essence of vulgarity.  Show him the quality of any beautiful work
of nature like the rose, or any beautiful work of art like an
Eastern carpet - being merely the exquisite gradation of colour,
one tone answering another like the answering chords of a symphony.
Teach him how the true designer is not he who makes the design and
then colours it, but he who designs in colour, creates in colour,
thinks in colour too.  Show him how the most gorgeous stained-glass
windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and the most
gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours - the primary colours
in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours
like brilliant jewels set in dusky gold.  And then as regards
design, show him how the real designer will take first any given
limited space, little disk of silver, it may be, like a Greek coin,
or wide expanse of fretted ceiling or lordly wall as Tintoret chose
at Venice (it does not matter which), and to this limited space -
the first condition of decoration being the limitation of the size
of the material used - he will give the effect of its being filled
with beautiful decoration, filled with it as a golden cup will be
filled with wine, so complete that you should not be able to take
away anything from it or add anything to it.  For from a good piece
of design you can take away nothing, nor can you add anything to
it, each little bit of design being as absolutely necessary and as
vitally important to the whole effect as a note or chord of music
is for a sonata of Beethoven.

But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this, again,
is of the essence of good design.  With a simple spray of leaves
and a bird in flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression
that he has completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or
lacquer cabinet at which he is working, merely because he knows the
exact spot in which to place them.  All good design depends on the
texture of the utensil used and the use you wish to put it to.  One
of the first things I saw in an American school of design was a
young lady painting a romantic moonlight landscape on a large round
dish, and another young lady covering a set of dinner plates with a
series of sunsets of the most remarkable colours.  Let your ladies
paint moonlight landscapes and sunsets, but do not let them paint
them on dinner plates or dishes.  Let them take canvas or paper for
such work, but not clay or china.  They are merely painting the
wrong subjects on the wrong material, that is all.  They have not
been taught that every material and texture has certain qualities
of its own.  The design suitable for one is quite wrong for the
other, just as the design which you should work on a flat table-
cover ought to be quite different from the design you would work on
a curtain, for the one will always be straight, the other broken
into folds; and the use too one puts the object to should guide one
in the choice of design.  One does not want to eat one's terrapins
off a romantic moonlight nor one's clams off a harrowing sunset.
Glory of sun and moon, let them be wrought for us by our landscape
artist and be on the walls of the rooms we sit in to remind us of
the undying beauty of the sunsets that fade and die, but do not let
us eat our soup off them and send them down to the kitchen twice a
day to be washed and scrubbed by the handmaid.

All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten.
Your school of design here will teach your girls and your boys,
your handicraftsmen of the future (for all your schools of art
should be local schools, the schools of particular cities).  We
talk of the Italian school of painting, but there is no Italian
school; there were the schools of each city.  Every town in Italy,
from Venice itself, queen of the sea, to the little hill fortress
of Perugia, each had its own school of art, each different and all
beautiful.

So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having, but
make by the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for the joy of
your own citizens, for you have here the primary elements of a
great artistic movement.

For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people
imagine.  For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy
atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the
smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and
from factory chimney.  You must have strong, sane, healthy physique
among your men and women.  Sickly or idle or melancholy people do
not do much in art.  And lastly, you require a sense of
individualism about each man and woman, for this is the essence of
art - a desire on the part of man to express himself in the noblest
way possible.  And this is the reason that the grandest art of the
world always came from a republic:  Athens, Venice, and Florence -
there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and simple
as sincere.  But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of
kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France
under the GRAND MONARQUE, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy
gilt furniture writhing under a sense of its own horror and
ugliness, with a nymph smirking at every angle and a dragon
mouthing on every claw.  Unreal and monstrous art this, and fit
only for such periwigged pomposities as the nobility of France at
that time, but not at all fit for you or me.  We do not want the
rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create more
beautiful things; for ever man is poor who cannot create.  Nor
shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by
a slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to
adorn or to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be
the noble and beautiful expression of a people's noble and
beautiful life.  Art shall be again the most glorious of all the
chords through which the spirit of a great nation finds its noblest
utterance.

All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great artistic
movement for every great art.  Let us think of one of them; a
sculptor, for instance.

If a modern sculptor were to come and say, 'Very well, but where
can one find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats
and chimney-pot hats?' I would tell him to go to the docks of a
great city and watch the men loading or unloading the stately
ships, working at wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway.  I
have never watched a man do anything useful who has not been
graceful at some moment of his labour:  it is only the loafer and
the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the
artist as he is to himself.  I would ask the sculptor to go with me
to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and
gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit
or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from
the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was
weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows
to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle-driver with
lifted lasso.  For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his
art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the
well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them
anywhere at all.  Gods and goddesses the Greek carved because he
loved them; saint and king the Goth because he believed in them.
But you, you do not care much for Greek gods and goddesses, and you
are perfectly and entirely right; and you do not think much of
kings either, and you are quite right.  But what you do love are
your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills
and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.

Ours has been the first movement which has brought the
handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by
separating the one from the other you do ruin to both; you rob the
one of all spiritual motive and all imaginative joy, you isolate
the other from all real technical perfection.  The two greatest
schools of art in the world, the sculptor at Athens and the school
of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely in a long
succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen.  It was the Greek
potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design
which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator
of chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always
true to its primary pictorial condition of noble colour.  For we
should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts
decorative arts.  The greatest triumph of Italian painting was the
decoration of a pope's chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in
Venice.  Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's
son, the other.  And the little 'Dutch landscape, which you put
over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is'
no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents of field and
forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once
melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.

Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or
English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic
attitude to-day, their own world, you should absorb but imitate
never, copy never.  Unless you can make as beautiful a design in
painted china or embroidered screen or beaten brass out of your
American turkey as the Japanese does out of his grey silver-winged
stork, you will never do anything.  Let the Greek carve his lions
and the Goth his dragons:  buffalo and wild deer are the animals
for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your
valleys in the spring and your hills in the autumn:  let them be
the flowers for your art.  Not merely has Nature given you the
noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above
all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.

You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied
than Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble
and think that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly.
If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous
decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the
marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture,
frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or inlay it with other
coloured marbles as they did in Venice.  Otherwise you had better
build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence
and with some beauty.  Do not treat your marble as if it was
ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it.  For it is
indeed a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only workmen of
nobility of invention and delicacy of hand should be allowed to
touch it at all, carving it into noble statues or into beautiful
decoration, or inlaying it with other coloured marbles:  for 'the
true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I
would fain see them taken advantage of to the full.  Every variety
is here, from pale yellow to purple passing through orange, red,
and brown, entirely at your command; nearly every kind of green and
grey also is attainable, and with these and with pure white what
harmony might you not achieve.  Of stained and variegated stone the
quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable.  Were brighter
colours required, let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used
in mosaic, a kind of work as durable as the solid stone and
incapable of losing its lustre by time.  And let the painter's work
be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber.

'This is the true and faithful way of building.  Where this cannot
be, the device of external colouring may indeed be employed without
dishonour - but it must be with the warning reflection that a time
will come when such aids will pass away and when the building will
be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin.
Better the less bright, more enduring fabric.  The transparent
alabasters of San Miniato and the mosaics of Saint Mark's are more
warmly filled and more brightly touched by every return of morning
and evening, while the hues of the Gothic cathedrals have died like
the iris out of the cloud, and the temples, whose azure and purple
once flamed above the Grecian promontory, stand in their faded
whiteness like snows which the sunset has left cold.' - Ruskin,
SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE, II.

I do not know anything so perfectly commonplace in design as most
modern jewellery.  How easy for you to change that and to produce
goldsmiths' work that would be a joy to all of us.  The gold is
ready for you in unexhausted treasure, stored up in the mountain
hollow or strewn on the river sand, and was not given to you merely
for barren speculation.  There should be some better record of it
left in your history than the merchant's panic and the ruined home.
We do not remember often enough how constantly the history of a
great nation will live in and by its art.  Only a few thin wreaths
of beaten gold remain to tell us of the stately empire of Etruria;
and, while from the streets of Florence the noble knight and
haughty duke have long since passed away, the gates which the
simple goldsmith Ghiberti made for their pleasure still guard their
lovely house of baptism, worthy still of the praise of Michael
Angelo who called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.

Have then your school of design, search out your workmen and, when
you find one who has delicacy of hand and that wonder of invention
necessary for goldsmiths' work, do not leave him to toil in
obscurity and dishonour and have a great glaring shop and two great
glaring shop-boys in it (not to take your orders:  they never do
that; but to force you to buy something you do not want at all).
When you want a thing wrought in gold, goblet or shield for the
feast, necklace or wreath for the women, tell him what you like
most in decoration, flower or wreath, bird in flight or hound in
the chase, image of the woman you love or the friend you honour.
Watch him as he beats out the gold into those thin plates delicate
as the petals of a yellow rose, or draws it into the long wires
like tangled sunbeams at dawn.  Whoever that workman be, help him,
cherish him, and you will have such lovely work from his hand as
will be a joy to you for all time.

This is the spirit of our movement in England, and this is the
spirit in which we would wish you to work, making eternal by your
art all that is noble in your men and women, stately in your lakes
and mountains, beautiful in your own flowers and natural life.  We
want to see that you have nothing in your houses that has not been
a joy to the man who made it, and is not a joy to those that use
it.  We want to see you create an art made by the hands of the
people to please the hearts of the people too.  Do you like this
spirit or not?  Do you think it simple and strong, noble in its
aim, and beautiful in its result?  I know you do.

Folly and slander have their own way for a little time, but for a
little time only.  You now know what we mean:  you will be able to
estimate what is said of us - its value and its motive.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed
to write about art.  The harm they do by their foolish and random
writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist
but to the public, blinding them to all, but harming the artist not
at all.  Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but
at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to
judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way
he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a
poet by the colour of his neck-tie.  I said there should be a law,
but there is really no necessity for a new law:  nothing could be
easier than to bring the ordinary critic under the head of the
criminal classes.  But let us leave such an inartistic subject and
return to beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art
which would represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be
exactly the art which you and I want to avoid - grotesque art,
malice mocking you from every gateway, slander sneering at you from
every corner.

Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the
workman.  You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your
somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a 'Japanese young man,'
at least a young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of
the modern world were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in
life was the difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china
- a paradox from which England has not yet recovered.

Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an
artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what
beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful
things they might create.

One summer afternoon in Oxford - 'that sweet city with her dreaming
spires,' lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning
as Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower,
past silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that
long, grey seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used
to, I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway
and a light cast-iron bridge in its place, desecrating the
loveliest city in England) - well, we were coming down the street -
a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going
to river or tennis-court or cricket-field - when Ruskin going up to
lecture in cap and gown met us.  He seemed troubled and prayed us
to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and
there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that
it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and
strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on
cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if
one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score,
a cane-handled bat.  He thought, he said, that we should be working
at something that would do good to other people, at something by
which we might show that in all labour there was something noble.
Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he
wished.  So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper
and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so
that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without
many miles of a round.  And when we came back in winter he asked us
to help him to make a road across this morass for these village
people to use.  So out we went, day after day, and learned how to
lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank
- a very difficult thing to do.  And Ruskin worked with us in the
mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our
enemies came out and mocked us from the bank.  We did not mind it
much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked
away for two months at our road.  And what became of the road?
Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the
swamp.  Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next
term there was no leader, and the 'diggers,' as they called us,
fell asunder.  And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst
the young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of
a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic
movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.
So I sought them out - leader they would call me - but there was no
leader:  we were all searchers only and we were bound to each other
by noble friendship and by noble art.  There was none of us idle:
poets most of us, so ambitious were we:  painters some of us, or
workers in metal or modellers, determined that we would try and
create for ourselves beautiful work:  for the handicraftsman
beautiful work, for those who love us poems and pictures, for those
who love us not epigrams and paradoxes and scorn.

Well, we have done something in England and we will do something
more.  Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant
young men, your beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on
a swamp for any village in America, but I think you might each of
you have some art to practise.


We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our culture,
a basis for our higher accomplishments in the work of our hands -
the uselessness of most people's hands seems to me one of the most
unpractical things.  'No separation from labour can be without some
loss of power or truth to the seer,' says Emerson again.  The
heroism which would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must
be that of a domestic conqueror.  The hero of the future is he who
shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of fashion and of
convention.

When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly
try and reconcile yourself with the world.  The heroic cannot be
the common nor the common the heroic.  Congratulate yourself if you
have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony
of a decorous age.

And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death
cannot harm.  The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the
wisdom of New England's Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of
that Attic genius dimmed:  the lips of Longfellow are still musical
for us though his dust be turning into the flowers which he loved:
and as it is with the greater artists, poet and philosopher and
song-bird, so let it be with you.




LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS




IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-
night I do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty
at all.  For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of
beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to
isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the
contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the
soul through the senses.  We want to create it, not to define it.
The definition should follow the work:  the work should not adapt
itself to the definition.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any
conception of ideal beauty:  he is constantly led by it either into
weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction:  whereas to touch the
ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality.  You must find it
in life and re-create it in art.

While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any
philosophy of beauty - for, what I want to-night is to investigate
how we can create art, not how we can talk of it - on the other
hand, I do not wish to deal with anything like a history of English
art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless
expression.  One might just as well talk of English mathematics.
Art is the science of beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth:
there is no national school of either.  Indeed, a national school
is a provincial school, merely.  Nor is there any such thing as a
school of art even.  There are merely artists, that is all.

And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you
unless you are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art
professorship.  It is of no use to you to know the date of Perugino
or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa:  all that you should learn
about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and a bad
picture when you see it.  As regards the date of the artist, all
good work looks perfectly modern:  a piece of Greek sculpture, a
portrait of Velasquez  - they are always modern, always of our
time.  And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not
national but universal.  As regards archaeology, then, avoid it
altogether:  archaeology is merely the science of making excuses
for bad art; it is the rock on which many a young artist founders
and shipwrecks; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young,
ever returns.  Or, if he does return, he is so covered with the
dust of ages and the mildew of time, that he is quite
unrecognisable as an artist, and has to conceal himself for the
rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or as a mere
illustrator of ancient history.  How worthless archaeology is in
art you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular.
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art.
Whatever is popular is wrong.

As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the
beautiful, or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going
to talk about.  The subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an
artist and what does the artist make; what are the relations of the
artist to his surroundings, what is the education the artist should
get, and what is the quality of a good work of art.

Now, as regards the relations of the artist to his surroundings, by
which I mean the age and country in which he is born.  All good
art, as I said before, has nothing to do with any particular
century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art;
the conditions that produce that quality are different.  And what,
I think, you should do is to realise completely your age in order
completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you
are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century,
but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and
that mere temporal considerations are no principle at all; and that
those who advise you to make your art representative of the
nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your
children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned.  But you
will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic
people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of
ours.

Of course he does.  I, of all men, am not going to deny that.  But
remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic
people, since the beginning of the world.  The artist has always
been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.  There is no
golden age of art; only artists who have produced what is more
golden than gold.

WHAT, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic
people?

Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the
Athenians, the citizens of one out of a thousand cities.

Do you think that they were an artistic people?  Take them even at
the time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of
the fifth century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets
and the greatest artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon
rose in loveliness at the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher
spake of wisdom in the shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy
swept in the perfection of pageant and pathos across the marble of
the stage.  Were they an artistic people then?  Not a bit of it.
What is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and
understand their art?  The Athenians could do neither.

How did they treat Phidias?  To Phidias we owe the great era, not
merely in Greek, but in all art - I mean of the introduction of the
use of the living model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the
English people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one
day and took off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate
on the charge of having allowed you to make use of the living model
in your designs for sacred pictures?

Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of
such an idea?  Would you not explain to them that the worst way to
honour God is to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the
work of His hands; and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must
take the most Christlike person one can find, and if one wants to
paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?

Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say
that such a thing was without parallel in history?

Without parallel?  Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.

In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you
will see a marble shield on the wall.  On it there are two figures;
one of a man whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the
godlike lineaments of Pericles.  For having done this, for having
introduced into a bas relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the
image of the great statesman who was ruling Athens at the time,
Phidias was flung into prison and there, in the common gaol of
Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old world.

And do you think that this was an exceptional case?  The sign of a
Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry
was raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and
thinker of their day - AEschylus, Euripides, Socrates.  It was the
same with Florence in the thirteenth century.  Good handicrafts are
due to guilds, not to the people.  The moment the guilds lost their
power and the people rushed in, beauty and honesty of work died.

And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such
a thing.

But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the
world has almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist
dwells no longer in the midst of the lovely surroundings which, in
ages past, were the natural inheritance of every one, and that art
is very difficult in this unlovely town of ours, where, as you go
to your work in the morning, or return from it at eventide, you
have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and
stupid architecture that the world has ever seen; architecture,
where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled, and every
lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing three-fourths
of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of the
vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they
are pretentious - the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the
windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the
houses you turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing
to look at but chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards,
vermilion letter-boxes, and do that even at the risk of being run
over by an emerald-green omnibus.

Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as
these?  Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you
yourselves would not wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is
worth doing except what the world says is impossible.

Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox.  What
are the relations of the artist to the external world, and what is
the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of
the most important questions of modern art; and there is no point
on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that the decadence of art has
come from the decadence of beautiful things; and that when the
artist cannot feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work.

I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid
aspect of a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what
were the artistic surroundings long ago.

Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose
beauty I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which
presented itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the
Gothic school of Pisa - Nino Pisano or any of his men (22):


On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter
palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry,
and with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding
troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and
shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming
light - the purple, and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over
the strong limbs and clashing mall, like sea-waves over rocks at
sunset.  Opening on each side from the river were gardens, courts,
and cloisters; long successions of white pillars among wreaths of
vine; leaping of fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange:
and still along the garden-paths, and under and through the crimson
of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest
women that Italy ever saw - fairest, because purest and
thoughtfullest; trained in all high knowledge, as in all courteous
art - in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in
loftier courage, in loftiest love - able alike to cheer, to
enchant, or save, the souls of men.  Above all this scenery of
perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white
alabaster and gold:  beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of
mighty hills hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea
of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara
mountains sent up their steadfast flames of marble summit into
amber sky; the great sea itself, scorching with expanse of light,
stretching from their feet to the Gorgonian isles; and over all
these, ever present, near or far - seen through the leaves of vine,
or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno's stream, or set
with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and burning
cheek of lady and knight, - that untroubled and sacred sky, which
was to all men, in those days of innocent faith, indeed the
unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men; and which
opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew into
the awfulness of the eternal world; - a heaven in which every cloud
that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of
its Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.

What think you of that for a school of design?


And then look at the depressing, monotonous appearance of any
modern city, the sombre dress of men and women, the meaningless and
barren architecture, the colourless and dreadful surroundings.
Without a beautiful national life, not sculpture merely, but all
the arts will die.

Well, as regards the religious feeling of the close of the passage,
I do not think I need speak about that.  Religion springs from
religious feeling, art from artistic feeling:  you never get one
from the other; unless you have the right root you will not get the
right flower; and, if a man sees in a cloud the chariot of an
angel, he will probably paint it very unlike a cloud.

But, as regards the general idea of the early part of that lovely
bit of prose, is it really true that beautiful surroundings are
necessary for the artist?  I think not; I am sure not.  Indeed, to
me the most inartistic thing in this age of ours is not the
indifference of the public to beautiful things, but the
indifference of the artist to the things that are called ugly.
For, to the real artist, nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself at
all.  With the facts of the object he has nothing to do, but with
its appearance only, and appearance is a matter of light and shade,
of masses, of position, and of value.

Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with
the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real
condition of the object.  What you, as painters, have to paint is
not things as they are but things as they seem to be, not things as
they are but things as they are not.

No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and
shade, or proximity to other things, it will not look beautiful; no
object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not
look ugly.  I believe that in every twenty-four hours what is
beautiful looks ugly, and what is ugly looks beautiful, once.

And, the commonplace character of so much of our English painting
seems to me due to the fact that so many of our young artists look
merely at what we may call 'ready-made beauty,' whereas you exist
as artists not to copy beauty but to create it in your art, to wait
and watch for it in nature.

What would you say of a dramatist who would take nobody but
virtuous people as characters in his play?  Would you not say he
was missing half of life?  Well, of the young artist who paints
nothing but beautiful things, I say he misses one half of the
world.

Do not wait for life to be picturesque, but try and see life under
picturesque conditions.  These conditions you can create for
yourself in your studio, for they are merely conditions of light.
In nature, you must wait for them, watch for them, choose them;
and, if you wait and watch, come they will.

In Gower Street at night you may see a letter-box that is
picturesque:  on the Thames Embankment you may see picturesque
policemen.  Even Venice is not always beautiful, nor France.

To paint what you see is a good rule in art, but to see what is
worth painting is better.  See life under pictorial conditions.  It
is better to live in a city of changeable weather than in a city of
lovely surroundings.

Now, having seen what makes the artist, and what the artist makes,
who is the artist?  There is a man living amongst us who unites in
himself all the qualities of the noblest art, whose work is a joy
for all time, who is, himself, a master of all time.  That man is
Mr. Whistler.

* * * * * * * *

But, you will say, modern dress, that is bad.  If you cannot paint
black cloth you could not have painted silken doublet.  Ugly dress
is better for art - facts of vision, not of the object.

What is a picture?  Primarily, a picture is a beautifully coloured
surface, merely, with no more spiritual message or meaning for you
than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from
the wall of Damascus.  It is, primarily, a purely decorative thing,
a delight to look at.

All archaeological pictures that make you say 'How curious!' all
sentimental pictures that make you say, 'How sad!' all historical
pictures that make you say 'How interesting!' all pictures that do
not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say 'How
beautiful!' are bad pictures.

* * * * * * * *

We never know what an artist is going to do.  Of course not.  The
artist is not a specialist.  All such divisions as animal painters,
landscape painters, painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist,
painters of English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters,
bull-terrier painters, all are shallow.  If a man is an artist he
can paint everything.

The object of art is to stir the most divine and remote of the
chords which make music in our soul; and colour is indeed, of
itself a mystical presence on things, and tone a kind of sentinel.

Am I pleading, then, for mere technique?  No.  As long as there are
any signs of technique at all, the picture is unfinished.  What is
finish?  A picture is finished when all traces of work, and of the
means employed to bring about the result, have disappeared.

In the case of handicraftsmen - the weaver, the potter, the smith -
on their work are the traces of their hand.  But it is not so with
the painter; it is not so with the artist.

Art should have no sentiment about it but its beauty, no technique
except what you cannot observe.  One should be able to say of a
picture not that it is 'well painted,' but that it is 'not
painted.'

What is the difference between absolutely decorative art and a
painting?  Decorative art emphasises its material:  imaginative art
annihilates it.  Tapestry shows its threads as part of its beauty:
a picture annihilates its canvas:  it shows nothing of it.
Porcelain emphasises its glaze:  water-colours reject the paper.

A picture has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy.
That is the first truth about art that you must never lose sight
of.  A picture is a purely decorative thing.




LONDON MODELS




PROFESSIONAL models are a purely modern invention.  To the Greeks,
for instance, they were quite unknown.  Mr. Mahaffy, it is true,
tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies
of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend
Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of
the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the
great Conservative leader of the day, but these GRANDES DAMES
clearly do not come under our category.  As for the old masters,
they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and
apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the
portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to
have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of
people whose sole profession is to pose.  In fact the model, in our
sense of the word, is the direct creation of Academic Schools.

Every country now has its own models, except America.  In New York,
and even in Boston, a good model is so great a rarity that most of
the artists are reduced to painting Niagara and millionaires.  In
Europe, however, it is different.  Here we have plenty of models,
and of every nationality.  The Italian models are the best.  The
natural grace of their attitudes, as well as the wonderful
picturesqueness of their colouring, makes them facile - often too
facile - subjects for the painter's brush.  The French models,
though not so beautiful as the Italian, possess a quickness of
intellectual sympathy, a capacity, in fact, of understanding the
artist, which is quite remarkable.  They have also a great command
over the varieties of facial expression, are peculiarly dramatic,
and can chatter the ARGOT of the ATELIER as cleverly as the critic
of the GIL BLAS.  The English models form a class entirely by
themselves.  They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so
clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to
speak, of their order.  Now and then some old veteran knocks at the
studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or
as King Lear upon the blasted heath.  One of them some time ago
called on a popular painter who, happening at the moment to require
his services, engaged him, and told him to begin by kneeling down
in the attitude of prayer.  'Shall I be Biblical or Shakespearean,
sir?' asked the veteran.  'Well - Shakespearean,' answered the
artist, wondering by what subtle nuance of expression the model
would convey the difference.  'All right, sir,' said the professor
of posing, and he solemnly knelt down and began to wink with his
left eye!  This class, however, is dying out.  As a rule the model,
nowadays, is a pretty girl, from about twelve to twenty-five years
of age, who knows nothing about art, cares less, and is merely
anxious to earn seven or eight shillings a day without much
trouble.  English models rarely look at a picture, and never
venture on any aesthetic theories.  In fact, they realise very
completely Mr. Whistler's idea of the function of an art critic,
for they pass no criticisms at all.  They accept all schools of art
with the grand catholicity of the auctioneer, and sit to a
fantastic young impressionist as readily as to a learned and
laborious academician.  They are neither for the Whistlerites nor
against them; the quarrel between the school of facts and the
school of effects touches them not; idealistic and naturalistic are
words that convey no meaning to their ears; they merely desire that
the studio shall be warm, and the lunch hot, for all charming
artists give their models lunch.

As to what they are asked to do they are equally indifferent.  On
Monday they will don the rags of a beggar-girl for Mr. Pumper,
whose pathetic pictures of modern life draw such tears from the
public, and on Tuesday they will pose in a peplum for Mr. Phoebus,
who thinks that all really artistic subjects are necessarily B.C.
They career gaily through all centuries and through all costumes,
and, like actors, are interesting only when they are not
themselves.  They are extremely good-natured, and very
accommodating.  'What do you sit for?' said a young artist to a
model who had sent him in her card (all models, by the way, have
cards and a small black bag).  'Oh, for anything you like, sir,'
said the girl, 'landscape if necessary!'

Intellectually, it must be acknowledged, they are Philistines, but
physically they are perfect - at least some are.  Though none of
them can talk Greek, many can look Greek, which to a nineteenth-
century painter is naturally of great importance.  If they are
allowed, they chatter a great deal, but they never say anything.
Their observations are the only BANALITES heard in Bohemia.
However, though they cannot appreciate the artist as artist, they
are quite ready to appreciate the artist as a man.  They are very
sensitive to kindness, respect and generosity.  A beautiful model
who had sat for two years to one of our most distinguished English
painters, got engaged to a street vendor of penny ices.

On her marriage the painter sent her a pretty wedding present, and
received in return a nice letter of thanks with the following
remarkable postscript:  'Never eat the green ices!'

When they are tired a wise artist gives them a rest.  Then they sit
in a chair and read penny dreadfuls, till they are roused from the
tragedy of literature to take their place again in the tragedy of
art.  A few of them smoke cigarettes.  This, however, is regarded
by the other models as showing a want of seriousness, and is not
generally approved of.  They are engaged by the day and by the
half-day.  The tariff is a shilling an hour, to which great artists
usually add an omnibus fare.  The two best things about them are
their extraordinary prettiness, and their extreme respectability.
As a class they are very well behaved, particularly those who sit
for the figure, a fact which is curious or natural according to the
view one takes of human nature.  They usually marry well, and
sometimes they marry the artist.  For an artist to marry his model
is as fatal as for a GOURMET to marry his cook:  the one gets no
sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

On the whole the English female models are very naive, very
natural, and very good-humoured.  The virtues which the artist
values most in them are prettiness and punctuality.  Every sensible
model consequently keeps a diary of her engagements, and dresses
neatly.  The bad season is, of course, the summer, when the artists
are out of town.  However, of late years some artists have engaged
their models to follow them, and the wife of one of our most
charming painters has often had three or four models under her
charge in the country, so that the work of her husband and his
friends should not be interrupted.  In France the models migrate EN
MASSE to the little seaport villages or forest hamlets where the
painters congregate.  The English models, however, wait patiently
in London, as a rule, till the artists come back.  Nearly all of
them live with their parents, and help to support the house.  They
have every qualification for being immortalised in art except that
of beautiful hands.  The hands of the English model are nearly
always coarse and red.

As for the male models, there is the veteran whom we have mentioned
above.  He has all the traditions of the grand style, and is
rapidly disappearing with the school he represents.  An old man who
talks about Fuseli is, of course, unendurable, and, besides,
patriarchs have ceased to be fashionable subjects.  Then there is
the true Academy model.  He is usually a man of thirty, rarely
good-looking, but a perfect miracle of muscles.  In fact he is the
apotheosis of anatomy, and is so conscious of his own splendour
that he tells you of his tibia and his thorax, as if no one else
had anything of the kind.  Then come the Oriental models.  The
supply of these is limited, but there are always about a dozen in
London.  They are very much sought after as they can remain
immobile for hours, and generally possess lovely costumes.
However, they have a very poor opinion of English art, which they
regard as something between a vulgar personality and a commonplace
photograph.  Next we have the Italian youth who has come over
specially to be a model, or takes to it when his organ is out of
repair.  He is often quite charming with his large melancholy eyes,
his crisp hair, and his slim brown figure.  It is true he eats
garlic, but then he can stand like a faun and couch like a leopard,
so he is forgiven.  He is always full of pretty compliments, and
has been known to have kind words of encouragement for even our
greatest artists.  As for the English lad of the same age, he never
sits at all.  Apparently he does not regard the career of a model
as a serious profession.  In any case he is rarely, if ever, to be
got hold of.  English boys, too, are difficult to find.  Sometimes
an ex-model who has a son will curl his hair, and wash his face,
and bring him the round of the studios, all soap and shininess.
The young school don't like him, but the older school do, and when
he appears on the walls of the Royal Academy he is called THE
INFANT SAMUEL.  Occasionally also an artist catches a couple of
GAMINS in the gutter and asks them to come to his studio.  The
first time they always appear, but after that they don't keep their
appointments.  They dislike sitting still, and have a strong and
perhaps natural objection to looking pathetic.  Besides, they are
always under the impression that the artist is laughing at them.
It is a sad fact, but there is no doubt that the poor are
completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness.  Those of them
who can be induced to sit do so with the idea that the artist is
merely a benevolent philanthropist who has chosen an eccentric
method of distributing alms to the undeserving.  Perhaps the School
Board will teach the London GAMIN his own artistic value, and then
they will be better models than they are now.  One remarkable
privilege belongs to the Academy model, that of extorting a
sovereign from any newly elected Associate or R.A.  They wait at
Burlington House till the announcement is made, and then race to
the hapless artist's house.  The one who arrives first receives the
money.  They have of late been much troubled at the long distances
they have had to run, and they look with disfavour on the election
of artists who live at Hampstead or at Bedford Park, for it is
considered a point of honour not to employ the underground railway,
omnibuses, or any artificial means of locomotion.  The race is to
the swift.

Besides the professional posers of the studio there are posers of
the Row, the posers at afternoon teas, the posers in politics and
the circus posers.  All four classes are delightful, but only the
last class is ever really decorative.  Acrobats and gymnasts can
give the young painter infinite suggestions, for they bring into
their art an element of swiftness of motion and of constant change
that the studio model necessarily lacks.  What is interesting in
these 'slaves of the ring' is that with them Beauty is an
unconscious result not a conscious aim, the result in fact of the
mathematical calculation of curves and distances, of absolute
precision of eye, of the scientific knowledge of the equilibrium of
forces, and of perfect physical training.  A good acrobat is always
graceful, though grace is never his object; he is graceful because
he does what he has to do in the best way in which it can be done -
graceful because he is natural.  If an ancient Greek were to come
to life now, which considering the probable severity of his
criticisms would be rather trying to our conceit, he would be found
far oftener at the circus than at the theatre.  A good circus is an
oasis of Hellenism in a world that reads too much to be wise, and
thinks too much to be beautiful.  If it were not for the running-
ground at Eton, the towing-path at Oxford, the Thames swimming-
baths, and the yearly circuses, humanity would forget the plastic
perfection of its own form, and degenerate into a race of short-
sighted professors and spectacled PRECIEUSES.  Not that the circus
proprietors are, as a rule, conscious of their high mission.  Do
they not bore us with the HAUTE ECOLE, and weary us with
Shakespearean clowns?  Still, at least, they give us acrobats, and
the acrobat is an artist.  The mere fact that he never speaks to
the audience shows how well he appreciates the great truth that the
aim of art is not to reveal personality but to please.  The clown
may be blatant, but the acrobat is always beautiful.  He is an
interesting combination of the spirit of Greek sculpture with the
spangles of the modern costumier.  He has even had his niche in the
novels of our age, and if MANETTE SALOMON be the unmasking of the
model, LES FRERES ZEMGANNO is the apotheosis of the acrobat.

As regards the influence of the ordinary model on our English
school of painting, it cannot be said that it is altogether good.
It is, of course, an advantage for the young artist sitting in his
studio to be able to isolate 'a little corner of life,' as the
French say, from disturbing surroundings, and to study it under
certain effects of light and shade.  But this very isolation leads
often to mere mannerism in the painter, and robs him of that broad
acceptance of the general facts of life which is the very essence
of art.  Model-painting, in a word, while it may be the condition
of art, is not by any means its aim.

It is simply practice, not perfection.  Its use trains the eye and
the hand of the painter, its abuse produces in his work an effect
of mere posing and prettiness.  It is the secret of much of the
artificiality of modern art, this constant posing of pretty people,
and when art becomes artificial it becomes monotonous.  Outside the
little world of the studio, with its draperies and its BRIC-E-BRAC,
lies the world of life with its infinite, its Shakespearean
variety.  We must, however, distinguish between the two kinds of
models, those who sit for the figure and those who sit for the
costume.  The study of the first is always excellent, but the
costume-model is becoming rather wearisome in modern pictures.  It
is really of very little use to dress up a London girl in Greek
draperies and to paint her as a goddess.  The robe may be the robe
of Athens, but the face is usually the face of Brompton.  Now and
then, it is true, one comes across a model whose face is an
exquisite anachronism, and who looks lovely and natural in the
dress of any century but her own.  This, however, is rather rare.
As a rule models are absolutely DE NOTRE SIECLE, and should be
painted as such.  Unfortunately they are not, and, as a
consequence, we are shown every year a series of scenes from fancy
dress balls which are called historical pictures, but are little
more than mediocre representations of modern people masquerading.
In France they are wiser.  The French painter uses the model simply
for study; for the finished picture he goes direct to life.

However, we must not blame the sitters for the shortcomings of the
artists.  The English models are a well-behaved and hard-working
class, and if they are more interested in artists than in art, a
large section of the public is in the same condition, and most of
our modern exhibitions seem to justify its choice.




POEMS IN PROSE




THE ARTIST


ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image
of THE PLEASURE THAT ABIDETH FOR A MOMENT.  And he went forth into
the world to look for bronze.  For he could think only in bronze.

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere
in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the
bronze of the image of THE SORROW THAT ENDURETH FOR EVER.

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned,
and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life.
On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this
image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the
love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that
endureth for ever.  And in the whole world there was no other
bronze save the bronze of this image.

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great
furnace, and gave it to the fire.

And out of the bronze of the image of THE SORROW THAT ENDURETH FOR
EVER he fashioned an image of THE PLEASURE THAT ABIDETH FOR A
MOMENT.


THE DOER OF GOOD


It was night-time and He was alone.

And He saw afar-off the walls of a round city and went towards the
city.

And when He came near He heard within the city the tread of the
feet of joy, and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud
noise of many lutes.  And He knocked at the gate and certain of the
gate-keepers opened to Him.

And He beheld a house that was of marble and had fair pillars of
marble before it.  The pillars were hung with garlands, and within
and without there were torches of cedar.  And He entered the house.

And when He had passed through the hall of chalcedony and the hall
of jasper, and reached the long hall of feasting, He saw lying on a
couch of sea-purple one whose hair was crowned with red roses and
whose lips were red with wine.

And He went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to
him, 'Why do you live like this?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him, and made answer
and said, 'But I was a leper once, and you healed me.  How else
should I live?'

And He passed out of the house and went again into the street.

And after a little while He saw one whose face and raiment were
painted and whose feet were shod with pearls.  And behind her came,
slowly as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours.
Now the face of the woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the
eyes of the young man were bright with lust.

And He followed swiftly and touched the hand of the young man and
said to him, 'Why do you look at this woman and in such wise?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him and said, 'But I
was blind once, and you gave me sight.  At what else should I
look?'

And He ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and
said to her, 'Is there no other way in which to walk save the way
of sin?'

And the woman turned round and recognised Him, and laughed and
said, 'But you forgave me my sins, and the way is a pleasant way.'

And He passed out of the city.

And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the
roadside a young man who was weeping.

And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and
said to him, 'Why are you weeping?'

And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer,
'But I was dead once, and you raised me from the dead.  What else
should I do but weep?'


THE DISCIPLE


When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of
sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping
through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it
comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet
waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of
their hair and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that
you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was
he.'

'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.

'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads.  'Us
did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your
banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he
would mirror his own beauty.'

And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on
my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw
ever my own beauty mirrored.'


THE MASTER


Now when the darkness came over the earth Joseph of Arimathea,
having lighted a torch of pinewood, passed down from the hill into
the valley.  For he had business in his own home.

And kneeling on the flint stones of the Valley of Desolation he saw
a young man who was naked and weeping.  His hair was the colour of
honey, and his body was as a white flower, but he had wounded his
body with thorns and on his hair had he set ashes as a crown.

And he who had great possessions said to the young man who was
naked and weeping, 'I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great,
for surely He was a just man.'

And the young man answered, 'It is not for Him that I am weeping,
but for myself.  I too have changed water into wine, and I have
healed the leper and given sight to the blind.  I have walked upon
the waters, and from the dwellers in the tombs I have cast out
devils.  I have fed the hungry in the desert where there was no
food, and I have raised the dead from their narrow houses, and at
my bidding, and before a great multitude, of people, a barren fig-
tree withered away.  All things that this man has done I have done
also.  And yet they have not crucified me.'


THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT


And there was silence in the House of Judgment, and the Man came
naked before God.

And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast
shown cruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those
who lacked help thou hast been bitter and hard of heart.  The poor
called to thee and thou didst not hearken, and thine ears were
closed to the cry of My afflicted.  The inheritance of the
fatherless thou didst take unto thyself, and thou didst send the
foxes into the vineyard of thy neighbour's field.  Thou didst take
the bread of the children and give it to the dogs to eat, and My
lepers who lived in the marshes, and were at peace and praised Me,
thou didst drive forth on to the highways, and on Mine earth out of
which I made thee thou didst spill innocent blood.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And again God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and the Beauty I
have shown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou
didst pass by.  The walls of thy chamber were painted with images,
and from the bed of thine abominations thou didst rise up to the
sound of flutes.  Thou didst build seven altars to the sins I have
suffered, and didst eat of the thing that may not be eaten, and the
purple of thy raiment was broidered with the three signs of shame.
Thine idols were neither of gold nor of silver that endure, but of
flesh that dieth.  Thou didst stain their hair with perfumes and
put pomegranates in their hands.  Thou didst stain their feet with
saffron and spread carpets before them.  With antimony thou didst
stain their eyelids and their bodies thou didst smear with myrrh.
Thou didst bow thyself to the ground before them, and the thrones
of thine idols were set in the sun.  Thou didst show to the sun thy
shame and to the moon thy madness.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And a third time God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Evil hath been thy life, and with evil
didst thou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness.  The hands
that fed thee thou didst wound, and the breasts that gave thee suck
thou didst despise.  He who came to thee with water went away
thirsting, and the outlawed men who hid thee in their tents at
night thou didst betray before dawn.  Thine enemy who spared thee
thou didst snare in an ambush, and the friend who walked with thee
thou didst sell for a price, and to those who brought thee Love
thou didst ever give Lust in thy turn.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And God closed the Book of the Life of the Man, and said, 'Surely I
will send thee into Hell.  Even into Hell will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell,
and for what reason?'

'Because in Hell have I always lived,' answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.

And after a space God spake, and said to the Man, 'Seeing that I
may not send thee into Hell, surely I will send thee unto Heaven.
Even unto Heaven will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee unto
Heaven, and for what reason?'

'Because never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it,'
answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.


THE TEACHER OF WISDOM


From his childhood he had been as one filled with the perfect
knowledge of God, and even while he was yet but a lad many of the
saints, as well as certain holy women who dwelt in the free city of
his birth, had been stirred to much wonder by the grave wisdom of
his answers.

And when his parents had given him the robe and the ring of manhood
he kissed them, and left them and went out into the world, that he
might speak to the world about God.  For there were at that time
many in the world who either knew not God at all, or had but an
incomplete knowledge of Him, or worshipped the false gods who dwell
in groves and have no care of their worshippers.

And he set his face to the sun and journeyed, walking without
sandals, as he had seen the saints walk, and carrying at his girdle
a leathern wallet and a little water-bottle of burnt clay.

And as he walked along the highway he was full of the joy that
comes from the perfect knowledge of God, and he sang praises unto
God without ceasing; and after a time he reached a strange land in
which there were many cities.

And he passed through eleven cities.  And some of these cities were
in valleys, and others were by the banks of great rivers, and
others were set on hills.  And in each city he found a disciple who
loved him and followed him, and a great multitude also of people
followed him from each city, and the knowledge of God spread in the
whole land, and many of the rulers were converted, and the priests
of the temples in which there were idols found that half of their
gain was gone, and when they beat upon their drums at noon none, or
but a few, came with peacocks and with offerings of flesh as had
been the custom of the land before his coming.

Yet the more the people followed him, and the greater the number of
his disciples, the greater became his sorrow.  And he knew not why
his sorrow was so great.  For he spake ever about God, and out of
the fulness of that perfect knowledge of God which God had Himself
given to him.

And one evening he passed out of the eleventh city, which was a
city of Armenia, and his disciples and a great crowd of people
followed after him; and he went up on to a mountain and sat down on
a rock that was on the mountain, and his disciples stood round him,
and the multitude knelt in the valley.

And he bowed his head on his hands and wept, and said to his Soul,
'Why is it that I am full of sorrow and fear, and that each of my
disciples is an enemy that walks in the noonday?'  And his Soul
answered him and said, 'God filled thee with the perfect knowledge
of Himself, and thou hast given this knowledge away to others.  The
pearl of great price thou hast divided, and the vesture without
seam thou hast parted asunder.  He who giveth away wisdom robbeth
himself.  He is as one who giveth his treasure to a robber.  Is not
God wiser than thou art?  Who art thou to give away the secret that
God hath told thee?  I was rich once, and thou hast made me poor.
Once I saw God, and now thou hast hidden Him from me.'

And he wept again, for he knew that his Soul spake truth to him,
and that he had given to others the perfect knowledge of God, and
that he was as one clinging to the skirts of God, and that his
faith was leaving him by reason of the number of those who believed
in him.

And he said to himself, 'I will talk no more about God.  He who
giveth away wisdom robbeth himself.'

And after the space of some hours his disciples came near him and
bowed themselves to the ground and said, 'Master, talk to us about
God, for thou hast the perfect knowledge of God, and no man save
thee hath this knowledge.'

And he answered them and said, 'I will talk to you about all other
things that are in heaven and on earth, but about God I will not
talk to you.  Neither now, nor at any time, will I talk to you
about God.'

And they were wroth with him and said to him, 'Thou hast led us
into the desert that we might hearken to thee.  Wilt thou send us
away hungry, and the great multitude that thou hast made to follow
thee?'

And he answered them and said, 'I will not talk to you about God.'

And the multitude murmured against him and said to him, 'Thou hast
led us into the desert, and hast given us no food to eat.  Talk to
us about God and it will suffice us.'

But he answered them not a word.  For he knew that if he spake to
them about God he would give away his treasure.

And his disciples went away sadly, and the multitude of people
returned to their own homes.  And many died on the way.

And when he was alone he rose up and set his face to the moon, and
journeyed for seven moons, speaking to no man nor making any
answer.  And when the seventh moon had waned he reached that desert
which is the desert of the Great River.  And having found a cavern
in which a Centaur had once dwelt, he took it for his place of
dwelling, and made himself a mat of reeds on which to lie, and
became a hermit.  And every hour the Hermit praised God that He had
suffered him to keep some knowledge of Him and of His wonderful
greatness.

Now, one evening, as the Hermit was seated before the cavern in
which he had made his place of dwelling, he beheld a young man of
evil and beautiful face who passed by in mean apparel and with
empty hands.  Every evening with empty hands the young man passed
by, and every morning he returned with his hands full of purple and
pearls.  For he was a Robber and robbed the caravans of the
merchants.

And the Hermit looked at him and pitied him.  But he spake not a
word.  For he knew that he who speaks a word loses his faith.

And one morning, as the young man returned with his hands full of
purple and pearls, he stopped and frowned and stamped his foot upon
the sand, and said to the Hermit:  'Why do you look at me ever in
this manner as I pass by?  What is it that I see in your eyes?  For
no man has looked at me before in this manner.  And the thing is a
thorn and a trouble to me.'

And the Hermit answered him and said, 'What you see in my eyes is
pity.  Pity is what looks out at you from my eyes.'

And the young man laughed with scorn, and cried to the Hermit in a
bitter voice, and said to him, 'I have purple and pearls in my
hands, and you have but a mat of reeds on which to lie.  What pity
should you have for me?  And for what reason have you this pity?'

'I have pity for you,' said the Hermit, 'because you have no
knowledge of God.'

'Is this knowledge of God a precious thing?' asked the young man,
and he came close to the mouth of the cavern.

'It is more precious than all the purple and the pearls of the
world,' answered the Hermit.

'And have you got it?' said the young Robber, and he came closer
still.

'Once, indeed,' answered the Hermit, 'I possessed the perfect
knowledge of God.  But in my foolishness I parted with it, and
divided it amongst others.  Yet even now is such knowledge as
remains to me more precious than purple or pearls.'

And when the young Robber heard this he threw away the purple and
the pearls that he was bearing in his hands, and drawing a sharp
sword of curved steel he said to the Hermit, 'Give me, forthwith
this knowledge of God that you possess, or I will surely slay you.
Wherefore should I not slay him who has a treasure greater than my
treasure?'

And the Hermit spread out his arms and said, 'Were it not better
for me to go unto the uttermost courts of God and praise Him, than
to live in the world and have no knowledge of Him?  Slay me if that
be your desire.  But I will not give away my knowledge of God.'

And the young Robber knelt down and besought him, but the Hermit
would not talk to him about God, nor give him his Treasure, and the
young Robber rose up and said to the Hermit, 'Be it as you will.
As for myself, I will go to the City of the Seven Sins, that is but
three days' journey from this place, and for my purple they will
give me pleasure, and for my pearls they will sell me joy.'  And he
took up the purple and the pearls and went swiftly away.

And the Hermit cried out and followed him and besought him.  For
the space of three days he followed the young Robber on the road
and entreated him to return, nor to enter into the City of the
Seven Sins.

And ever and anon the young Robber looked back at the Hermit and
called to him, and said, 'Will you give me this knowledge of God
which is more precious than purple and pearls?  If you will give me
that, I will not enter the city.'

And ever did the Hermit answer, 'All things that I have I will give
thee, save that one thing only.  For that thing it is not lawful
for me to give away.'

And in the twilight of the third day they came nigh to the great
scarlet gates of the City of the Seven Sins.  And from the city
there came the sound of much laughter.

And the young Robber laughed in answer, and sought to knock at the
gate.  And as he did so the Hermit ran forward and caught him by
the skirts of his raiment, and said to him:  'Stretch forth your
hands, and set your arms around my neck, and put your ear close to
my lips, and I will give you what remains to me of the knowledge of
God.'  And the young Robber stopped.

And when the Hermit had given away his knowledge of God, he fell
upon the ground and wept, and a great darkness hid from him the
city and the young Robber, so that he saw them no more.

And as he lay there weeping he was ware of One who was standing
beside him; and He who was standing beside him had feet of brass
and hair like fine wool.  And He raised the Hermit up, and said to
him:  'Before this time thou hadst the perfect knowledge of God.
Now thou shalt have the perfect love of God.  Wherefore art thou
weeping?'  And he kissed him.



Footnotes:

(1) Plato's LAWS; AEschylus' PROMETHEUS BOUND.

(2) Somewhat in the same spirit Plato, in his LAWS, appeals to the
local position of Ilion among the rivers of the plain, as a proof
that it was not built till long after the Deluge.

(3) Plutarch remarks that the ONLY evidence Greece possesses of the
truth that the legendary power of Athens is no 'romance or idle
story,' is the public and sacred buildings.  This is an instance of
the exaggerated importance given to ruins against which Thucydides
is warning us.

(4) The fictitious sale in the Roman marriage PER COEMPTIONEM was
originally, of course, a real sale.

(5) Notably, of course, in the case of heat and its laws.

(6) Cousin errs a good deal in this respect.  To say, as he did,
'Give me the latitude and the longitude of a country, its rivers
and its mountains, and I will deduce the race,' is surely a glaring
exaggeration.

(7) The monarchical, aristocratical, and democratic elements of the
Roman constitution are referred to.

(8) Polybius, vi. 9. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(9) [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(10) The various stages are [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

(11) Polybius, xii. 24.

(12) Polybius, i. 4, viii. 4, specially; and really PASSIM.

(13) He makes one exception.

(14) Polybius, viii. 4.

(15) Polybius, xvi. 12.

(16) Polybius, viii. 4:  [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(17) Polybius resembled Gibbon in many respects.  Like him he held
that all religions were to the philosopher equally false, to the
vulgar equally true, to the statesman equally useful.

(18) Cf. Polybius, xii. 25, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(19) Polybius, xxii. 8.

(20) I mean particularly as regards his sweeping denunciation of
the complete moral decadence of Greek society during the
Peloponnesain War, which, from what remains to us of Athenian
literature, we know must have been completely exaggerated.  Or,
rather, he is looking at men merely in their political dealings:
and in politics the man who is personally honourable and refined
will not scruple to do anything for his party.

(21) Polybius, xii. 25.

(22) THE TWO PATHS, Lect. iii. p. 123 (1859 ed.).





End of the Project Gutenberg eText Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde