says the beautiful song in Cymbeline. The sciences pounce upon that lark like hawks, and tear it to pieces between them. But the truth about the lark—is it in the unreal abstractions of the sciences, or is it in the poet’s perception of the lark in all the fulness, colour, and richness of actual existence?

The little Gradgrinds, says Dickens, had cabinets in various departments of science. “They had a little chronological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet, and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stones and ore looked as though they might have been broken off from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments, their own names.”

But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science that things exist in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is impaled on a pin and ranged in a glass case with other Lepidoptera. In the real universe it flutters alone amid the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life; it does not know it has been classified. This classification exists only in some student’s mind; the truth is in the fluttering butterfly. And Truth really flutters like a butterfly, free and joyous, winged with iridescent splendours and subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula, but an airy aliveness.

When I was a youth studying mathematics and the ’ologies, I became infected with the sense of superiority to the crowd which these pursuits bring: such cold, logical reasoning, such rare reaches of thought! To think that men eminent in these branches should remain unrewarded by popular fame, while every petty scribbler with a gift of invention commanded the applause of the mob! To be a novelist seemed a paltry affair; yet later on I came to recognise that the crowd is right, and that those who decry the predominance of the novel are wrong. All these sciences and speculations deal with human life, not in its living fulness, but with an abstractness which makes it dead, unreal, false. The world’s instinctive distrust of pedants and students and mathematicians is justified. They isolate one aspect of life, one thread of the tangled skein, one motif in the eternal symphony, and sometimes drawing from reality the merest shred of tune, execute upon it an enormous fantasia—as in the higher mathematics—which plays itself out inaudibly in vacuo. The cold perfection of mathematics is due to our having eliminated in advance all the accidents of reality, and even the supposed infallibility of the proposition that two and two are four shatters itself upon the futility of adding two elephants to two speeches on the Irish question. And yet in those callow days it was to Number that I, like Pythagoras, was fain to look for the key of the riddle. But that was under the glittering spell of the late Monsieur Taine, who well-nigh persuaded me that a Science was only truly Scientific when it passed from the qualitative to the quantitative stage. If you could only express everything by mathematical formulæ, then at last you would catch that shy bird, Truth, by the tail. Strip away Truth’s feathers, then the flesh, then even the bones, till you get a meaningless world of imaginary atoms, and that, forsooth, is the ultimate Truth. “The universe,” said Taine triumphantly, “will one day be expressed in mathematical formulæ.” In other words, strip away all there is to know, get rid of all that interests you, the colour and the form and the glow of life, and then you will really know the thing. The only way to know a thing is elaborately to prevent yourself from knowing it.

That invaluable institution the Post Office annually provides us with statistics. So many billion letters are sent a year, so many postcards, so many packages, and of these so many are left open, and so many unaddressed or unstamped, and so many go astray. These figures have as much to do with the realities implied in this correspondence as the figures of the quantitative sciences with the realities they are drawn from. Even could it be proved that the ratio of unaddressed letters to addressed is constant over a given area, or that the percentage of postcards varies inversely with the status of the senders, how much nearer are we to the hot passions and wild despairs, the commercial greeds and the loving humours which are the actuality of the phenomena under calculation?

Even the lines and angles of geometry, which have more body than statistics, are a poor substitute for the full, rich world, with its forests and skies. Mathematics may be indispensable to navigation, but on the sea of life we sail very well without it. Some of the most charming women I know count on their fingers. When

it is indifferent to the situation that the rose is compact of chemical atoms dancing in complex figures, setting to partners, visiting and retreating.

Biron in “Love’s Labour Lost,” professing to derive his learning from women’s eyes, which are

was, though the sentiment may be unpopular in this educational age, wiser than Faust in his study soliloquising on the curse of useless learning. Many of the statements of science are true for the abstract logical faculty; they are not actually conceivable. We laugh at the mediæval controversies as to how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, but surely our modern theory of the atomic constitution of the needle-point justifies the question. One angel per atom would exhaust the angelic hosts. Perhaps the sparks emitted for years by one drop of bromide of radium on the point of a needle are really a dance of demons. Or take the undulatory theory of light—that to produce the varying colours of the spectrum the luminiferous ether must vibrate from 458 to 727 million of million times per second. It might as well have been a thousand billions or ten trillions for all the difference to our understanding. To give us such figures is like offering a million-pound note to an omnibus conductor and expecting change. The best scientists admit that these conceptions are but working hypotheses. Nay, I find a worthy German actually calling them “useful fictions.” Indeed, they cannot endure cross-examination, and if you want to see a scientific man as angry as a theologian of the Inquisition era, you will treat his mystic conceptions as Tom Paine treated the mysteries of religion. The world went very well ere we knew the fairy-tales of science and learned to dread death in every breath we took, every crumb we ate, every drop of non-alcoholic drink we drank. As if it were not tragic enough to read the newspapers, we are harassed with the life-histories of insects invisible to the naked eye, thirty generations or so of which live and die every day in a drop of ditch-water. At the same time such surface questions as why a man lives six times as long as a dog and a tortoise six times as long as a man are left in absolute darkness.

Men of science are to be admired for their patient and fearless groping after knowledge, the only reward of which is the applause of that splendid international brotherhood of learning. But this knowledge of theirs is never more than raw material for the philosopher at the centre to weave into his synopsis. No doubt there are men of science who preserve their perspective, who do not view the universe as heaven-sent material for a series of text-books, but this part of their thinking is done, not as scientists, but as poets or philosophers. Classification is all that Science Proper can do, and when the pigeon-holing is complete to the last Z, the universe will remain as mysterious as before. When the astronomers have determined the size, weight, orbit, speed, and spectrum lines of all the four hundred millions of visible stars, we shall still look up and say,

But this pigeon-holing of the universe by Science is conspicuously incomplete. For by a paradoxical modesty the man of science too often forgets to include himself in the inventory.

In this way Herbert Spencer explained everything—except Herbert Spencer. Possibly the forgetfulness is wilful, because the existence of the man of science upsets so many of his explanations. “I find in the Universe no trace of Will or Reason,” protested one of them to me. “I see only the blind movement of forces, mechanical as billiard-balls.” “Naturally,” I retorted, “if you omit to look in the one direction where Reason and Will assuredly exist—in your own self.”

On the physical plane we get movement without will, on the animal plane the will to live, on the human plane the will to live divinely. These three strata cannot be reduced to a lowest common denominator of blind force. And if they could, the miracle of their differentiation would still remain. That blind forces should rise to consciousness and write books about themselves is even more wonderful than an eternity of spirit. Reduce all the seventy odd elements to one, as Chemistry hopes, and instead of an explanation you will only get the new puzzle of how the one could contain the seeds of the many. Even the popular Evolution theory is but a juggling with time. You do not get rid of Creation by shifting the beginning back to a billion years last Tuesday.

And with all my admiration for the fine qualities of the man of science I cannot away with his cocksureness, so curiously proof against the fact that scientific conceptions are always changing—witness the revolution wrought by radium. Even such a simple analysis as the composition of air has taken in many new and important constituents—argon, xenon, helium, krypton, neon, &c.—since the days when as a schoolboy I got full marks for stating them inaccurately. And yet to this day the scientist recounting the constituents of air forgets to wind up, “With power to add to their number.”

As for those sciences which do not depend on intellectual conceptions and practical experiments, but on antiquarian research, those learned and dry-as-dust studies which academies delight to honour, they owe all their importance simply to antiquity’s lack of self-consciousness and its failure to provide for the curiosity of posterity. Had the first man who evolved from the ape drawn up a note upon his ancestor, or, better still, made a picture of his ancestral tree, what controversies we should have been spared! Had the builders of the Pyramids or the delvers of the Roman catacombs put up little tablets to explain their ideas, what scholarship would have been nipped in the bud! The reputation of the Egyptologists depends on the fact that the writers of hieroglyphics apparently left no dictionary. If one were to turn up, the reputation of these savants would be gone. At present they are able to translate the same text by “The King went a-hunting” or “My grandmother is dead” without ceasing to be taken seriously.

But it is in the realm of Italian art-connoisseurship that the greatest havoc would be wrought did an official catalogue come to light, say in one of the recesses of the Vatican or in that wilderness of the Venetian archives. For the lordly neglect of the Old Masters to put their names to their pictures has flooded us with a tedious pedantry of rival attributions, and the thing of beauty, instead of being a joy for ever, is an eternal source of dulness.

“Ass who attributes it to Mantegna,” I saw scribbled on a fresco, at Padua, of St. Antony admonishing Ezzelino, and connoisseurship is merely politer. As long ago as 1527 a quiz or a braggart of an artist, Zacchia da Vezzano, painted underneath a sacred picture of his, now in Lucca:

As who should say, “Take away the name and anybody can tell the artist.” But experience proves the contrary.

I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as by the pedigree of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a source of certainty like the contemporary slatings in the Renaissance Review. Some of these sleuth-hounds might even be vindicated; and I opine that to you, amico mio, who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pronounced no less than thirty-two to be hung on false evidence, the discovery of a set of Accademia catalogues would not be unwelcome. But your career as a connoisseur would close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli, collapsed the drapery students and ear-measurers, whose mathematics had, indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life.

The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being.

Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems?

No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation,

They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more important than its intellectual skeleton.

But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and who shall contradict the Venus of Milo?

Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and wingèd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Provençal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they grow in. Mañana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words, words, words.”

A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in The Ring and the Book sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible world. The world is not complete without

When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or Lamartine calls on the lake to remember his happiness, Ruskin would tell us that this suffusion of Nature with our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On the contrary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera space—without any emotion of its own. As the former with equal phlegm records a song or a curse, or the latter a wedding or a funeral, so does Science register its impassive observations. For once admit such a shifting subjective factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious objectivity of Science? Away, therefore, with all but the frigid intellectual view of things! Since the other elements of Truth elude our grasp, let us boldly declare them irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science, you see, comes not at the end of its operations. Science starts bankrupt. It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment of truth. A cat may look at a king—but its observation will not be very profound. And Science is as little equipped for observing the universe as the cat for observing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in an unconscious continuum. It is a post-mortem investigation to ascertain, not the cause of death, but the cause of life.

But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things in a vacuum, not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed butterflies, but a breathing, flying, singing, striving, and suffering process—an unfinished infinitude. This kinetic process cannot be expressed in terms of statics. “What is Truth?” says the jesting cosmos, and does not stay for an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can be expressed for the intellect in static ’ologies and ’onomies, on the understanding that the intellect never forgets to put back its results into the palpitating flux to which they belong and in which alone they have true significance. This understanding the intellect too frequently violates or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the man of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe synthetically with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy, comedy, heroic drama, sombre suffering, majestic mystery, all these are in the flux—more surely than ether waves and dancing atoms—and the poet in painting the fulness of life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a fuller truth than any that Science can attain to. “We cannot really know the truth unless we love the truth,” said Fénelon. “They who love well will know well.” This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe repeated it when he said that “No one can write about anything unless he writes about it with love.” “To see things in their beauty,” said Matthew Arnold, “is to see them in their truth.” It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe is the most beautiful in the world.

Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? Nay, as if to mock at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to yield up its secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies of Kant or Mansel or Plato’s “Parmenides.” Follow up mere thought, however apparently clear, and it lands us in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning of wisdom.

For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth in two dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional vision by volition that we arrive at Truth’s full-orbed reality. Even love cannot bring wisdom unless the love translates itself into action. In short, the meaning of Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect into a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the Way and the Life.

Aristotle in his “Metaphysics” tells us that Cratylus carried the scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that he at last was of opinion one ought to speak of nothing, but merely moved his finger. Aristotle does not see that in this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at least the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most important. For the universe is not a museum, placarded “Look, but please do not touch.” It says, “Touch, and then you will really see. Live, work, love, fight, and then you will really know what the nature of your universe is.”

The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-setting for the spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of dead things called Science, the real truth is of live things—a triple truth in which intellect, will, and emotion are one. Our sense of this truth—obtained as it is during emotional volition—is individual, irreducible to the simpler planes of Science and Art, and thus incommunicable. And the measure of our attainment of it will be the measure of our sympathetic insight and of the depth to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of the phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts may break into music like a Beethoven score under the baton of a master.

The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony consisted of the atoms of the paper and ink which constitute the score, or even who expressed it mathematically as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made by strings and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was curious black strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the statistician who should count the semi-breves or fortissimo passages. The true truth of the symphony comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to souls whose life it enlarges.

And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of beauty our righteousness. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

When I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kindly peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the soft snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when, faring forth to Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin. Into what innumerable itching tentacles these gilded or cuprous grains are to drop: white-cuffed hands of waiters, horny digits of vetturini and facchini, gnarled fins of gondoliers and hookers, grimy paws of beggars, shrivelled stumps of cripples, dexterous toes of armless ancients, spluttering mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing children, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets of hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers, pious palms of monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of cathedrals, long-handled fishing-nets of little churches, musty laps of squatting, mumbling crones, greasy caps of guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors, clutching claws of unbidden cicerones. All these—and how many more!—photographers and painters and copyists and forgers, modellers and restorers and lecturers on ruins, landlords and cooks and critics—live by Italy’s ancient art. Great Cæsar dead—and turned to Show.

The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autochthones; yet how strange the existence of the Neapolitan swimmer whose métier is to dive for coppers when the steamer sails for the witching cliffs of Sorrento, and to cry in enticing gurgles, “Money in the water!” the spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the soft patois of Venice! Precisely when the Bay of Naples is a violet dancing flame, and Vesuvius, majestically couchant, sends her white incense to the blue, and you are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary merman to drag you down to the depths.

“Nutritive chains” the biologists name the inter-related organisms whose existence depends on one another, and another link of this chain you shall count the boatmen waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri. Their skiffs dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at a fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the struggle for existence to the only function by which they can survive, for they are fittest to pass under the low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant consenting to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent water in the Capri cave—that lovely flame of light blue in a bluer burning spirit—sustains likewise the naked diver who stands poised on a rock, ready to show its chromatic effects upon flesh; the culminating moment of whose day—the feeding-time, as it were—comes when the tourists glide in.

Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff skimming over beauty with which the native is in deep elemental contact, from which, indeed, he wrests his living.

Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those famous Wanderjahre in Italy, a swollen stream of pious art-pilgrims has been pouring over the land. And coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid impression of modern bustling streets and motors and trams and a great press of people, and ten thousand parasites battening on the art and beauty of the city, and it was not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte Vecchio, with its mediæval stalls, that the city of the lily seemed to possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose herself under her deep blue sky into a noble harmony, with her heights and her palaces and her river and her arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her ancient rusty houses, and rise behind into a fantasy of quaint roofs and brick domes and steeples and belfries, all floating in a golden glory; and as I reflected on all she was and held within her narrow compass, how the names of great men and great days were written on every stone, and how every sort of art had been poured over her as prodigally as every sort of earth-beauty; and as I thought of the enchanting villages around and above her, where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed cool glooming pools, and white roads went winding odorous with may and sweet with the song of thrush and blackbird, framing and arabesquing the faery city below in magic tangles of leafy boughs; and as I remembered that here to-day in this same city was not only spring, but Botticelli’s Spring—then it seemed to me that her flowers and her palaces, her frescoes and the curves of her hills were pushed up from the same deep elemental core of beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-snobs of the world had dumped its masses of raw building, run up its hundreds of hotels and pensions, piled its pyramids of handbooks, biographies, Dantes, histories, essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters, encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed its cohort of copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of professional photographers, supplemented by an amateur corps of Kodak snapshooters; but that, breathing lightly beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated even by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise radiant in her immortal strength and beauty, shaking off the Lilliputian creatures and their spawn of print, ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots, imperturbable amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemorial admiration.

The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered sometimes, as pioneers will, and even Goethe, one notes with malicious glee, spent himself upon the wrong pictures, gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Caracci, Guido and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking all Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater himself, the pontifical Pater, though he has the merit of a Botticelli pioneer, yet thought it necessary to apologise for criticising “a second-rate painter”: which is as though one should apologise for discussing Keats.

Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their admirations. The Kunstforscher, that Being usually made in Germany, has been busy since their day. Amid the great movement of life, while men have been sowing and reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love, this spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and statues, scientifically analysing away their authenticity and often their charm. There is the Venus de’ Medici, which generations have raved over, which innumerable processions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found admirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her “spurious and meretricious,” and to-day nobody who respects himself would allow himself a thrill at the sight of her. Yet Childe Harold cried:

I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty of the Medici Venus does appear a trivial prettiness. But even the Venus of Milo—though we are still permitted to admire her—is “late and eclectic.”

The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has anything to do with La Fornarina.

As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the Medusa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures,

Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the Medusa is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater gloats over its beauty of conception.

Then there is that little matter of Leonardo’s St. John in the Louvre. Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it, and Pater alludes to it as “one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted,” and builds upon it a complex theory of Leonardo’s symbolic suggestive method, and is not surprised at the saint’s “strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near it, which set Théophile Gautier thinking of Heine’s notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of Paganism, took employment in the new religion.” And now the St. John turns out to have been a pupil’s or an imitator’s, and probably not even a St. John.

The culture-pilgrims of to-day, armed with sacred text-books, verbally infallible, and canonical lists of authentic attributions, enjoy a suspicious superiority in æsthetic judgment over the greatest creative artists. For Goethe and Byron and Shelley did at least create, and Pater’s interpretation of Mona Lisa is finer than the picture itself; whereas the pursuit of culture in the average pilgrim is a confession of sterility either in himself or in his own nation, which is not sufficiently vitalised to absorb his interests. “If the Romans had had to learn Latin,” said Heine, “they would never have conquered the world.” And were England free in thought and nobly artistic, there would be no need of this fervour for the preservation of Greek. Even Goethe, it is amazing to discover from his “Italiänische Reise,” never saw the sea till he went to Italy. And his first glimpse of it was, of all places in the world, at the Lido in Venice! He with the German Ocean to draw from him, as it drew from Heine, the cry of “Thalassa!”; he who might have seen how

must fare forth to another land and behold a lazy, almost tideless lagoon lapping in shallow muddiness on the tamest and dullest shore in the world. Surely we have here an ironic image of the culture-pilgrim who sets out to see Art abroad before he has seen Nature at home.

When the Goths besieged Rome, Belisarius hurled down upon them the statues of the Mausoleum of St. Angelo, and the tomb was turned to a citadel. But against the siege of Rome by the Goethes there is no known defence. A rain of statues would merely aggravate their zeal, and the more hopelessly the statues smashed, the more would their admiration solidify. So to-day the Goethes and the Huns alike are invited up to see the statues—for a fee—and every citadel of reality is turned to a mausoleum-museum. St. Angelo, that has stood the storms of eighteen centuries, is the perquisite of a facetious warder who gabbles automatically of Beatrice Cenci, “la più bella ragazza d’ Italia,” as he points out her pitiful, if dubious, dungeon. In the stone cell of the Florentine monastery, on whose cold flags Savonarola wore his knees in fasting and prayer, a guide holds up a reflector to concentrate the light on the frescoes with which Fra Angelico glorified the rude walls. Where St. Catherine walked—in the footsteps of the Bridegroom—leaving the marks of her miraculous feet, a buxom native of Siena expects her obolus. Outside the pyramid-shadowed cemetery where Keats lies under his heart-broken epitaph, a Roman urchin turns supplicatory somersaults. Italia Bella, a paper published at Milan, adjured Arona to wake up and celebrate the tercentenary of the canonisation of its Saint Carlo, “if only because it pays.” History, with its blood and tears, becomes æsthetics for the tourist and economics for the native. Of a truth quaint links concatenate Cæsar and the showman, the saint with the apple-woman who finds a profitable pitch for her stall at his church-corner. While we are fuming and strutting we are but providing popcorn for posterity. Buskined heroes of history, who walk the earth in tragic splendour, perchance your truest service to humanity has been done in affording occupation for the poor devil who expatiates upon the traces of your passing. This, at least, ye may be sure is good service; the rest of your work, who shall sever the good and evil strands of it? So much pother of prophets and politicians—and, lo! how poor a planet we still wander in.

The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of popcorn, is a futile being. Culture as a mere excursion from a solid home-reality may be vitalising, but whoso thinks to batten on alien arts and letters is filling his belly with the sirocco. There is no reality in the travel-world, be it the world of Art or the world of Nature, for we have no true volitional relations with it. ’Twas Schopenhauer who discovered this for Art—though his World has only the two dimensions of Will and Idea. But he did not, if I remember, point out that everything seen with aloofness from action partakes of this art-quality. The landscape from the observation-car is a mere picture to us, however real to the peasants working in the fields.

The only “real” traveller is the commercial. We others, wandering through streets that our ancestors did not build, or sitting in alien apartments and gazing upon unhomely hills, are still spectators, not actors. We are not rooted in this soil, nor feel the deep intimacies that are the truest truth about it. I may partake in the annual festa of an Italian mountain village, hear the Mass, bear banner and taper in the procession, salute the saintly image, dance upon the plateau-piazza with a snooded peasant-girl, but how shall I feel the holiness and joy of this day of days?—I whose infant breath was not drawn amid these precipitous fastnesses, who have not lived in these human caves cut in the rock, who have not played in these steep stone streets, who know nothing of the dear narrowness, the vivid intensity that is born of cramped consciousness! There is in the very attitude of spectator something that stands between one and the object in its truth. This it is that makes the appreciations of cities by the school of Pater such hollow phantasy, such bastards of an accident by a temperament. This it was that begot Pierre Loti’s monumental misreading of Japan as a Lilliput of the pretty-pretty. To lose the artistic Ego in the inner life of the phenomenon—how rare the critic who is capable of that! Listening to these parasites upon alien autocosms,

one would imagine that a civilisation or a city existed, that its remote founders had fevered and its burghers toiled and its architects built, to the mere end that centuries after they were dust some exquisite vibrations should be registered on a sensitive soul.

Only less arrogant is it to place one’s soul in patronising “appreciation” before some great historic structure—a cathedral, a mosque, a palace, a library. These works of man so immensely transcend any man’s works that he fits into them almost as ludicrously as a mouse. A cathedral that represents the genius and labours and sacrifices of generations towers so immensely out of proportion to any individual that he can only recover a reasonable relation to it by fusing himself into the life and stature of the race. To be solely concerned with its impingement upon his own soul is an impertinence, to pass his life in contriving such impingements is to live by robbery, and to enjoy these secular products of human solidarity on the Paterian pretext that the only reality is the fleeting and isolated Ego, is peculiarly paradoxical.

Pater himself would even go so far as to study men, e.g. Pico di Mirandola, for their æsthetic flavours. This is, indeed, to live resolutely Im Schönen if not Im Ganzen, and it is, therefore, the more curious, that in citing Goethe’s maxim in his “Winckelmann” Pater should, like Carlyle, have unconsciously substituted Im Wahren for Im Schönen. The æsthetic appreciation of Pico—as of most things—is a mere by-product. I do not deny that by-products are sometimes delightful. But let us not mistake them for central verities. And these churches, these pictures, these statues, these palaces, these monasteries which we see to-day in two dimensions, had once their third dimension of reality, nay often have it still to those who know them in their truth. How quaint that juxtaposition of Bibles and Baedekers in Italian churches! The image which, seen through tears, is soothing a worshipper’s pain, is at the same moment finding exact appreciation at the eyes of a connoisseur. Who can read without emotion of how in thirteenth-century Florence Cimabue’s Madonna, “the first Madonna the people could love,” was borne in triumph from the painter’s studio to its church by the whole population of the quarter, which henceforwards took the name of the Allegro Borgo! To-day the art-critic analyses its types and its composition, and it takes its place coldly in the history of painting as the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan. But the citizens of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavour of the thing.

Despite the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake it remains questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to No-man’s-land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches living interests with their myriad indirect relations to action, to the third dimension. Every art-product holds, however subtly, something of that topical quality which makes the portrait of a contemporary celebrity, wet from the painter’s brush, very different from the peaceful remoteness of an Old Master.

No half-deciphered face of dim sweetness, charming us from the magic casement of some fading fresco by some forgotten artist, as with the very image of Art aloof and absolute, but was once wrought for a specific market and born into a specific atmosphere. The forlorn stumps and torsos that litter the moss-grown courts of museums were hailed, as they fell from the craftsman’s hand, by a definite clientèle, rejoicing in their beauty, stimulated by their freshness. Nothing, alas! is so old, so corroded with time, but it was once brand new, the pleasant novelty of the day to beings looking back upon an immemorial antiquity, and now long since mouldered to dust. Every blurred inscription, every crumbling pillar and shattered fragment had once its life, its meaning, its public.

The hand of time in eliminating the topical element and reducing a picture to pure Art—the inactive beauty that is its own end—removes from our perception the full reality of the art phenomenon as it fell from the artist’s hand into time and space.

Some parts of this original plenitude were indeed better forgotten, for the Old Masters who were young once, young and impecunious, turned Renaissance art into a fancy dress ball of their patrons, the Magnificent Ones figuring as saints and patriarchs, Bethlehem shepherds and Magian kings, whom oblivious time has done well to mellow into a quasi-anonymity. But if the loss of such intellectual elements is a gain, I am less certain as to the evaporation of the emotional auras of works of art.

Andrea Orcagna worked ten years at the marble Gothic Tabernacle that stands in the fuscous Or San Michele of Florence, and men of other races and faiths gaze perfunctorily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its pictorial reliefs, wrought after the plague of 1348 from the pious legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors. The marble gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that is its own end—but where are the hope and the faith, the mourning and the anguish that made the atmosphere in which its beauty had birth? Ebbed to the eternal silence, like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which Cimabue’s Madonna was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a picture of Duccio’s to its due church in Siena. Can it be that Art, launched thus upon a sea of emotion, is only its true self when stranded high and dry upon the beach?

Is perhaps its most precious aspect precisely that by which it is related to life? And its least precious part that which remains over for the connoisseur of beauty? Oh but this is heresy, almost the philistinism of a Tolstoy or a Savonarola.

But believe me, my dear Virtuosi, that flavour which the citizens of the Joyous Quarter tasted, that wild-strawberry flavour of living, that dog-rose aroma of reality which you miss by your wilful avoidance of volitional relations, by your gospel of Art for Art’s sake, is as exquisite as any of your hot-house flowers and fruitage. Are you rushing in pursuit of the new pleasure? Nay, it can only be captured by those who do not pursue it, who are even unaware that it exists. Mill’s eudæmonistic paradox again, you see.

Has any professional hunter of the æsthetic ever, I wonder, had so exquisite a sense of the starry heaven as Garibaldi when he embarked from Quarto to redeem his country? “O night of the fifth of May, lit up with the fire of a thousand lamps with which the Omnipotent has adorned the Infinite! Beautiful, tranquil, solemn with that solemnity which swells the hearts of generous men when they go forth to free the slave!”

“He never tampered with his sense of reality.” These words came to me as the epitaph of an old Jewish pedlar when I heard of his passing away in far-off Jerusalem. He too knew this joy of the Allegro Borgo (though in his autocosm the Madonna was an idol) and gleams of it sustained him through long years of poverty and pain, and through the shadows of his closing hour. Pictures, songs, histories—all had no existence for him outside his religion. All were but ministers of faith, to feed its sacred flame. There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity, what a giant strength! Pitiful ye seem in comparison, ye unshelled æsthetes, wandering in search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit every one in turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-emotion, never—save perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and idea from actuality! Think of it, ye who have played such tricks with your souls as would make the angels weep, whose pious emotion has as much relation to religion as the enjoyment of a painted ocean to a struggle in the blind waters. You, Monsieur Loti of the Académie Française, with your vain literary vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, will you not envy this high seriousness which found an exaltation in forty fasts a year, without bite or sup, and drew a salty vitalisation from the tear of penitence? And you, sophisters of religion, who cling to your creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradition, or a branch of respectability; and above all, you, amateurs of “la volupté dans la dévotion,” after the recipe of Barrès; you, neo-Catholics who mistake masturbation for adoration, bow your heads before one who worshipped God as naïvely as a dog adores his master, who did not even know that he believed, who was belief; who went to Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was Zion, whose tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured with never a thought of the wonder and picturesqueness of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred years before he was born! Poor Parsifal! Poor pure fool! Gone is thy restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom.

But because I have been privileged to see this sancta simplicitas of the old Jewish pedlar, I feel I know my Middle Ages better than the Protestant connoisseur whose learning flattens me out, or the pseudo-Catholic in search of sensations. I understand the Allegro Borgo, I say, and I am not appalled by the terrible list of Christian forgeries and legends, the apocryphal Gospels, the pseudo-Epistles, the hagiologies, for I know that ’tis the dry light of literary history that is false—like every other science—and that in life all these figments may have been the harmless nutriment of saintly souls. In this old Jew’s autocosm, too, there were no physical impossibilities, no incredible miracles, no monsters or leviathans so strange but their names in Hebrew letters were a certificate of pedigree; the centuries were fused for him as by a cosmic cinematograph, the patriarchs and saints hovering over him in immortal synchrony. So am I not taken aback to see the Bambino still in his mother’s lap by the time the Visconti present the Certosa to the Madonna, nor does it disconcert me to behold all the abbots and bishops of Christendom in attendance at the Crucifixion with consoling models of their churches. And as for the Madonna being an Italian grande dame dressed in Venetian silks or Florentine brocades, how else, pray, are we to preserve religion? True local colour and true Jerusalem costuming would have brought relativity into the absoluteness of belief, would have been a reminder that the Madonna was a foreigner. The truer truth is that she is Our Lady.

Art, you see, had in its palmy days to be a full-orbed reality, carrying conviction as well as beauty to the guileless beholder. To us too ’tis only the masterpiece attuned to our own macrocosm that can give us this plenary satisfaction. Even “Paradise Lost” is for us merely a magnificent banquet of words, the virgin bloom of Paradise truly lost with our faith in the groundwork of the epic. Tolstoy’s attack on Art fails to differentiate between the Art of alien autocosms, the Culture Art which divides our soul against itself, and the real vitalising Art of our own epoch. For though we say, “Blessed are the simple, who live in the Absolute,” ’tis no necessary converse to cry damnation on the complex. Art, we know, is in a sense a playing with life, an outcome, as Schiller said, of the play-impulse, the exuberance of energies not exhausted in the struggle for existence. This is what Carlyle felt when he denounced mere rhymesters and canvas-colourers; it was the secret of his “imperfect sympathies” (in Elia’s phrase) with Shakespeare himself. ’Tis Hebraism versus Hellenism—the earnestness of the writers of the Bible, whose Art is an unconscious enhancement, a by-product struck off at white heat, versus the self-conscious manipulation of themes by Æschylus or Sophocles. A sense of futility and superfluity, if not of positive pravity, lies behind the eternal distrust of the Puritan for the make-believe of Art, his suspicion of the theatre and the nudities of Pagan sculpture. A prick of atavistic Calvinism caused the writer with the profoundest instinct for make-believe our generation has seen—Robert Louis Stevenson—suddenly to declare that the artist was no better than a fille de joie. But this was because the bulk of Stevenson’s fiction—unlike his essays and his poetry—is Art in its anecdotage, without serious relation to the spirit. And there are moods in which a jejune elegance or an empty exhilaration is as unsatisfying as a lady’s boudoir; and the artist, as a maker of beautiful toys, must sink into the same place as the contriver of perfumes and cushions. In Japan, where every workman is an artist, Art is in its proper place, and there is neither cant nor confusion. But besides the little Art of decorative line and melodious tinkle and romantic falsification of life there is the greater Art which has in it the unrest of the ocean and the silence of the starry night. Art, if in some instances it has sprung direct from the play-impulse, has largely come to us by way of religion, and where it is merely play for play’s sake—as in rococo Art—it is doomed to sterility.

Although Art represents, yet, as photography came to prove, representation is not the aim of Art. The aim of Art is creation—creation that stimulates the soul. The artist has not to reproduce his model, but to create something new, living, and stimulating by help of it. He adds new creations to Nature. He marries her facts to his passion and pain, and the offspring is Art—Nature crossed by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the symphonies of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the statues of Michelangelo, transmit to us the artists’ spiritual exaltations, their ideals of beauty and energy. It boots not to point out that the artist is often selfish and licentious, irritable and vain. It is the greatnesses of his soul, not its pettinesses, which he puts into his art; his emotions and ideals into its content, his sincerity into its craftsmanship. And by greatnesses I do not mean only moral greatnesses, for life is larger than morality. It is his own temperament with which the artist crosses Nature. And that is why schools of Art can never yield more than craft: new creations can only be got by new crossings.

I would grant the Puritan, to whom all Art is of Satan, as I would grant his strange ally, Plato, that æsthetics may be abused, especially when divorced from life. There are young ladies who consume a novel a day, Sundays not omitted, by which process half their waking life is passed in a species of opium-eating. There are amateurs of music whose life is a surfeit of sweet sounds, and picture-lovers whose day is an orgy of line and colour. But when Tolstoy, perceiving what a sensual sty of Fine Art we may wallow in, ranged himself with the old Puritan iconoclasts, and launched his famous Platonic encyclical against music divorced from public psalmody, song sundered from harvest-festivity, or poetry that was not a marching song to the Millennium, he overlooked that even a healthy soul may have a surplusage of play-energy—nay, that this is the very child-soul—and that even from a Puritan point of view Fine Art may purify for fine Action, though it lack the direct nexus with Action. Tolstoy’s tracts on religion may even be less vitalising for our age than “Anna Karenina” operating by way of the Aristotelian katharsis.

And the relation of so-called fiction to truth may be even closer than its nexus with Action. For it follows from our analysis of Science that novels and plays have the great initial veracity of reproducing the fulness of life as compared with the segregative sciences with their one-sided abstractions, which are to actuality as the conjugations in a Greek grammar are to a conversation with Helen of Troy. While the artificial selection of Science breaks a whole into parts, the artificial selection of Art can make a part truly represent the whole. And the greater the artist-soul the less will it play with its moods by the artificial and conscious refraction of Art for Art’s sake. None should know better than Tolstoy that the highest Art is only Truth seen as Beauty. The great artist’s registration and reflection of the universe in tone or colour, line or word, is, indeed, the highest form of Science at our command, fact and flower in one. “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Milton, Browning, were not playing with life. The world of Art may not be the world of Science, but it is the world we live in, the human world furnished with faith and emotion, no less “real” than the naked universe of physical law.

To accept Art for Art’s sake, to divorce it from life, would be to pigeon-hole our souls, as most people put their religion into Sundays. The deepest analysis seems to conduct us back to a recognition that Art and Reality, though they have no necessary relation, do actually tend to approach each other in the greatest Art. The greatest writers—a Shakespeare or a Tourgénieff—in that selection from life which constitutes Art, select so as to give a sense of the whole, avoiding the one-sided selection which gives us on the one hand the disproportionate sexualities of the Palais-Royal farce or of the elegant bawdy-book, on the other the disproportionate sentimentalisms of goody-goody fiction. In painting, too, the Art which seizes the essence of places and people is the greatest, and I believe the greatest music seizes the essence of moods. Moreover, it is only by their relations to human realities that imaginative creations like Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Swift’s Lilliputians, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the Caliban of Shakespeare or the Jungle-Beasts of Kipling, have power to hold us. It may give us a useful distinction between Imagination and Fancy to connect the one with invention along the lines of life and born of insight into its essence—as in the creation of Hamlet; the other with artificial invention—as in the creation of Alice’s Wonderland. Whether Hamlet existed or not, or that Prince Hal did exist, is irrelevant to Art. The transient reality has been replaced by the permanent creation. Per contra, what was meant as Truth may survive only as Art, like the mythological parts of the “Iliad,” “Macbeth,” “Paradise Lost,” or the “Divina Commedia.” Yet, as I have just pointed out, even these great artistic creations lose their hold in proportion as they cease to seem in correspondence with external realities. And if the supreme test of plastic and literary Art is its communication of a sense of life, is it not Truth we are really worshipping, Truth under another name? For lifelikeness, if it does not necessarily mean likeness to particular individuals, does necessarily mean likeness to universals. And Selection, though it omits portions of the truth, does not omit the whole truth—nay, sometimes reveals the whole truth by cutting away the obscuring details. Reality is the inexhaustible fons et origo of all great Art; apart from which there is no life in Art, but a rootless, sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme artist, the Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and Make-believe, Hebraism and Hellenism, disappears. A Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a Michelangelo as a Savonarola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as a Darwin.

As earnest, but not as limited. The biggest souls have never been able to express their sense of the multiform flowingness of things in neat packets of propositions; they have expressed it through the infinitude of Art. And Art, having once in human history been the medium of the spirit, must never sink back into a soulless toy. The Art of the future must vivify Science and take it up into Life; it must touch Truth with emotion and exalt it into Religion.