initial commit of ebook 774HEADmain

2 files changed, 5565 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/sandl10.txt b/old/sandl10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..20ef0ae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sandl10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5565 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde
+#4 in our series by Oscar Wilde
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+Essays and Lectures
+
+by Oscar Wilde
+
+January, 1997  [Etext #774]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde
+*****This file should be named sandl10.txt or sandl10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, sandl11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sandl10a.txt.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month:  or 400 more Etexts in 1996 for a total of 800.
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach 80 billion Etexts.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/BU":  and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. (BU = Benedictine
+University).  (Subscriptions to our paper newsletter go to BU.)
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Benedictine University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Benedictine
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Benedictine University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde
+Scanned and proofed by David Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
diff --git a/old/sandl10.zip b/old/sandl10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cde1227
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sandl10.zip