making use of forms that they found already to hand-re-creating them with a new life. Indeed Goethe, seeing that "art is long and life short," actually advises the adoption of themes already worked up. In the "Faust" he has made Mephistopheles sing, as his serenade beneath the window of Margaret, a song which is almost a literal translation of Ophelia's "Good morrow, 'tis Saint Valentine's day;" and, in speaking to Eckermann on the subject, he asks, "Why should I give myself the trouble to compose a new song when Shakespeare's was exactly the right thing, saying just what was required?" This principle of recreation is of course a very different thing from a dead eclecticism. "Facts and characters," he also says, "being provided, the poet has only the task of animating the whole." And he goes on to state that the "knowledge of the world," as well as the "region of love, hate, hope, despair, or by whatever other names you call the moods and passions of the soul," are innate with the poet, and he "needs not much experience or observation to represent them adequately." At the same time, if he wishes to escape criticism for offending against facttruth he must have recourse to experience or tradition; "for it is not born with him to know, for instance, how courts are held, or how a parliament or a coronation is managed."

I cannot but think that the results of the theory of imitation (or, perhaps, the disregard of all theories)

as seen in our modern galleries, theatres, and literature, is of the most deplorable character. Every one who has naturally, or has acquired, any skill in imitation but who may possess no artistic power whatsoever-dubs himself with the name of artist, and is accredited as such.

Our academies are filled with clever studies from nature, and tricks of colour, exceedingly ingenious and admirable as materials for a picture; and the more clever is the effect produced the greater is the market value of the painting. In the theatres, too, we find all the materials for a great drama: dazzling scenery, passions, stirring events, copied directly from nature in the most glowing colours-passions and scenery and events that in nature might be full of meaning, but are now utterly meaningless-endeavouring to simulate an appearance of life and reality by their gorgeous dress, like those bedecked and bejewelled corpses which the poet Morris describes in his "Earthly Paradise" as sitting amid regal splendour at their banquet.

Perhaps it may have occurred to some, as an objection to what I have said, that Shakespeare speaks of "holding up the mirror to nature." This expression (which is also used by Plato) is often quoted in support of the theory of imitation in art. If you will examine the context you will find that, firstly, the poet is speaking of playing and not of composing a part, and, secondly, that he explains

the expression to mean that we should "show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image;" that is, that we should create forms and images in which such ideas shall be recognized-not merely that we should copy material forms of things. Another expression of Shakespeare's, though it specially applies to the "art" of propagating varieties of plants, may be taken in a more general sense.

"Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes."

By this he wishes us to infer, as it seems to me, that the product of the artist's mind is a real growth, no less real than are the products of the laws of nature— no less real than the “streaked gillyvors ;" and is, in this sense, "made by nature." It is an existence in the great order of things. But it by no means follows that it is therefore subject to what we loosely call natural laws, as we shall see a little later.

We may dismiss this question of imitation by the remark of Goethe, who says truly that, "Art is called art, just because it is not nature."

Mankind may

Let us now look to "pleasure." pleasure." roughly be divided into two great classes, to which every one, consciously or unconsciously, belongs— those who look on pleasure or happiness (or whatever other more etherialized name you like to give it) as an end in itself, and those who do not. It may

be that we are predestined to such a notion that it is innate in us,-but, however this may be, the principle involved is that which lies at the root of all our character and our views of life. It would be utterly idle and presumptuous of me to attempt to treat this question with a hope of convincing those who differ from me; for to convince them would mean to change entirely their mode of looking at things-to change their inborn character by a syllogism. But as regards art, if we once allow that its function is imitation, we must also allow that its end is mere pleasure. We therefore naturally find philosophers, such as Aristotle, who define poetry as “truthful imitation," and even Bacon, who allows that art aims at a "more ample greatness" than can be seen in nature, and gives poetry the name of "imaginative fiction," and the "theatre of the mind,” and all those who seek for a true end in material objects—all utilitarians, hedonists, and the like, as well as the followers of the modern sickly æstheticism—and, besides these, others who profess lofty religious ideals, but who draw a charmed circle, outside of which they will recognize no revelation,-all these, we find, tell us that the end of art is to give pleasure-innocent, healthy, bracing pleasure perhaps, but nothing higher than pleasure.

"I would define," says the American poet, Poe, "the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the intellect

or with the conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless accidentally, it has no concern with Duty or Truth."

Now I would dare to affirm, in opposition to this, that poetry is the creation of a reality, real by virtue of the ideal truth that it represents; and that its sole arbiter is not taste, but our sense of ideal truth or perfection, to whose verdict we shall find that both taste and understanding must bow.

But are we not to love a thing simply for its beauty? Must we always be extracting a moral from such things? Emphatically-no. Indeed, to

endeavour to formulate and define to ourselves in words or thought the idea brought to us is merely to transfer it to another form, whereas we ought to accept it in the form in which it comes, whether as a thing of beauty appealing to us through our senses, or otherwise.

I must, however, state more fully what I mean by that beauty of which Taste is the sole arbiter.

The qualities in things that attract or repel usbeauty and unloveliness,-whether they consist in certain combinations of sensible things, or of a "proportion" of which these things are the expressed numbers, whatever these qualities are, they act on us through a sense just in the same size, is brought to us by the senses. things as beautiful or repulsive by what we call our sense of beauty in the same way as we classify things

way as colour, or We can classify