strongest marks that he treats 'love' as a matter not to be mixed with life, in the larger sense of the word, at all-as a matter all of whose other connexions are dropped; a sort of secret game that can go on only if each of the parties has nothing to do, even on any other terms, with any one else.

I have dwelt on the fact that the sentimental intention in 'Il Fuoco' quite bewilderingly fails, in spite of the splendid accumulation of material. We wait to the end to see it declare itself, and then are left, as I have already indicated, with a mere meaningless anecdote on our hands. Brilliant and free, each freighted with a talent that is given us as incomparable, the parties to the combination depicted have, for their affection, the whole world before them-and not the simple terraqueous globe, but that still vaster sphere of the imagination in which, by an exceptionally happy chance, they are able to move together on very nearly equal terms. A tragedy is a tragedy, a comedy is a comedy, when the effect, in either sense, is determined for us, determined by the interference of some element that starts a complication or precipitates an action. As in 'Il Fuoco' nothing whatever interferes-or nothing, certainly, that need count for the high spirits represented-we ask why such precious revelations are made us for nothing. Admirably made in themselves, they yet strike us as, æsthetically speaking, almost cruelly wasted.

This general remark would hold good, as well, of 'Le Vergini,' if I might still linger, though its application has already been virtually made. Anatolia, in this tale, the most robust of the three sisters, declines marriage in order to devote herself to a family who have, it would certainly appear, signal need of her nursing. But this, though it sufficiently represents her situation, covers as little as possible the ground of the hero's own, since he, quivering intensely with the treasure of his 'will,' inherited in a straight line from the cinque-cento, only asks to affirm his sublimated energy. The temptation to affirm it erotically, at least, has been great for him in relation to each of the young women in turn; but it is for Anatolia that his admiration and affection most increase in volume; and it is, accordingly, for her sake that, with the wonderful moral force behind him (kept

as in a Florentine casket), we most look to see him justified. He has a fine image-and when has the author not fine images?-to illustrate the constant readiness of this possession. The young woman says something that inspires him, whereupon, 'as a sudden light playing over the dusky wall of a room causes the motionless sword in a trophy to shine, so her word drew a great flash from my suspended volontà. There was a virtue in her,' the narrator adds, which could have produced portentous fruit. Her substance might have nourished a superhuman germ.' In spite of which it never succeeds in becoming so much as a question that his affection for her shall act, that this grand imagination in him shall operate, that he himself is, in virtue of such things, exactly the person to come to her aid and to combine with her in devotion. The talk about the volontà is amusing much in the same way as the complacency of a primitive man, unacquainted with the uses of things, possessed, by some accident, of one of the toys of civilisation, a watch or a motor-car. And yet, artistically, for our author, the will has an application, since without it he could have done no such vivid work.

Here, at all events, we put our finger, I think, on the very point at which his æsthetic plenitude meets the misadventure that discredits it. We see just where it 'joins on' with vulgarity. That sexual passion from which he extracts such admirable detached pictures insists on remaining for him only the act of a moment, beginning and ending in itself and disowning any representative character. From the moment it depends on itself alone for its beauty it endangers extremely its distinction, so precarious at the best. For what it represents, precisely, is it poetically interesting; it finds its extension and consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and assimilation, it has no more dignity than-to use a homely image-the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms. Detached and unassociated, these clusters of objects present, however obtruded, no importance. What the participants do with their agitation, in short, or even what it does with them, that is the stuff of poetry, and it is never really interesting save

when something finely contributive in themselves makes it so. It is this absence of anything finely contributive in themselves, on the part of the various couples here concerned, that is the open door to the trivial. I have said, with all appreciation, that they present the great 'relation,' for intimacy, as we shall nowhere else find it presented; but to see it related, in its own turn, to nothing in the heaven above or the earth beneath, this undermines, we definitely learn, the charm of that achievement.

And so it is, strangely, that our æsthetic 'case' enlightens us. The only question is whether it be the only case of the kind conceivable. May we not suppose another with the elements differently mixed? May we not, in imagination, alter the proportions within or the influences without, and look with cheerfulness for a different issue? Need the aesthetic adventure, in a word, organised for real discovery, give us no more comforting news of success? Are there not, so to speak, finer possible combinations? are there not safeguards that, in the example before us, were but too presumably absent? To which the sole answer probably is that no man can say. It is Signor D'Annunzio alone who has really sailed the sea and brought back the booty. The actual case is so good that all the potential fade beside it. It has for it that it exists, and that, whether for the strength of the original outfit or for the weight of the final testimony, it could scarce thinkably be bettered.

Art. IV.-RECENT ESTHETICS.

1. Raumaesthetik und Geometrisch-optische Täuschungen. By Theodor Lipps. Leipzig: Barth, 1893-97.

2. Einfühlung und Association in der neueren Aesthetik. By Paul Stern. Hamburg: Voss, 1897.

3. Einleitung in die Aesthetik. Der aesthetische Genuss. By Karl Groos. Giessen, 1892, 1902.

4. Die Spiele der Menschen. By Karl Groos. Jena, 1899. 5. L'esthétique du Mouvement. La suggestion dans l'Art. By P. Souriau. Paris: Alcan, 1889, 1893.

6. Pain, Pleasure and Esthetics. By H. Rutgers Marshall. London: Macmillan, 1894.

7. The Origins of Art. By Yrjö Hirn. London: Macmillan, 1900.

8. Die Anfänge der Kunst. By Ernst Grosse. Freiburg, 1894. (Translation: New York, 1897.)

9. Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien. By Ernst Grosse. Tübingen, 1900.

IN an article published in the Quarterly Review' for April 1900, dealing with Tolstoi's 'What is Art?' I had occasion to allude to a new science of aesthetics, which, in my opinion, could already dispose of some of the great Russian's arguments, and indicate a reconciliation between art and life different from his ascetic conclusions. It is the object of the following pages to give some account of these new æsthetics, to define the various problems which they are gradually seeking to resolve, and to point out the tracks of study along which they may eventually attain a solution.

I have said that these æsthetics are new, and I should add that they are still rudimentary, full of hypotheses admitting as yet of no demonstration, and of collections of facts requiring to be brought into intelligible connexion. Nor could it be otherwise. Whereas the æsthetics of the past were, in the main, a branch of purely constructive philosophy, concerned rather with logical coherence than with verification, and therefore systematic and dogmatic; the aesthetics of to-day are, on the contrary, not so much what is actually expounded by any single writer as what results from the unintentional concord

ance of various students, and the convergence, rather inevitable than actual, of several kinds of study. For the problems concerning beauty and ugliness, and concerning those artistic activities which increase the one and diminish the other-the problems of æsthetics-are being approached from two sides, and by two sets of investigators, who are often ignorant of each other's existence and, oftener still, ignorant of the very questions which they and their unknown collaborators are between them narrowing into definite existence.

These unconnected studies, thus unconsciously converging in the new science of æsthetics, are themselves recent and immature. They are, respectively, the science of mind which, under the name of psychology, has only lately detached itself from general philosophy; and the various sciences dealing with the comparison, the origin and the evolution of artistic form, and which are still dependent on ethnography and anthropology on the one hand, on archæology and what is called connoisseurship on the other. Thus it is significant that whatever materials for an eventual science of æsthetics have been left us by the past exist as fragmentary facts, partial observations, and lopsided hypotheses, scattered in the works of philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Spencer, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the works of specialists of some definite branch of art like Winckelmann and Morelli, or pleaders in the cause of some definite artist, like Ruskin in Modern Painters,' and Nietzsche in the Wagner Case.' There remains, besides, a large amount of fact and theory eventually applicable to æsthetics in books on children, savages, and lunatics, and the whole literature admirably dealt with by Professors Ernst Grosse and Yrjö Hirn. And the methods to be employed, the analogies to be followed, nay, the underlying reasons of the phenomena under consideration, will be learned mainly from biologists, psychologists, students of bodily and mental evolution, who, for the most part, misunderstand or disdain the very existence of æsthetics.

The object of the present paper is to show some of the points on which all these separate studies are tending to converge, in the hope that an attempt to map out the vague field of aesthetics may contribute to the defini