Heralds of revolt; studies in modern literature and dogma

Front matter

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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE

Introduction

PAGES

The School for Critics xvii xlviii

I. THE GENIUS OF GEORGE ELIOT

PASES

Her death — ^Why no tomb in Westminster Abbey — Likeness to Savonarola — Her insight sympathetic and creative — ^Instances^ Dinah Morris, Hetty Sorrelj Tito Melema, Dorothea Brooke, Mr. Casaubon, ■ Mr. Bulstrode — ^No proper villains — Florence and Romola — Prometheus Bound before he had got the heavenly fire — Contrast of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte — ^Epic Pythoness of Science — Love a minor interest — Two periods in her novel-writing — Dutch manner, Loamshire humour and pathos — Her melancholy — Suggested comparison with Dickens — The literature of Positive ideals .... 1 — 29

II. JOHN INGLESANT

Romance as a vehicle of propaganda — A Platonic allegory — Inward Lights, Divine SUences — ^New antique, time of Charles I. — John Inglesant's training — ^The imaginary Jesuit, Father St. Clare — His religion an intrigue and a scepticism— Inglesant at Court — Mary Collet the nun of Little Gidding — The King at Oxford — Adventures and exile of John J he meets Hugh Cressy, becomes the agent of Cardinal Rinuccini — Rome under the Popes — Malvolti's vision — Heresy of Molinos — Dogma and Mysticism-i— What is a religious "Liberal"? — The Roman Church from without and from within . . . 30—65

X SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

III. CARLYLE

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Immense literature of the subject^Carlyle's many-sided influence— The Swift of the nineteenth century— Secret of his unhappiness— Hard judgment of British public concerning him— What did he teach? — His attitude towards religion: he did not know Christ— Puritan converted to Goethe's views, but still touched with hereditary gloom —Why so much occupied about Voltaire— Origin of Carlylese — Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Hume— Meaning of " Sartor Resartus " —A remarkable Te Deum— The " exodus from Houndsditch " — But " intellect at the heart of things "—Destiny or Providence ?— Carlyle prophesies against modern superstitions — Colour, depth, energy, " fire and tears " of his message — How he resembles St. Paul — And is unlike Goethe— Catholicism, " the Mass the only genuine relic of religious worship" — Agnosticism, "ground glass under the guise of finest wheaten flour"— Christianity, the Everlasting Yea , 66 — 101

IV. AN APOSTLE OF NIRVANA : H. F. AMIEL

Famous by one book in a single day — Akin to Leopardi, to Pascal — Maximum of culture, minimum of character — The doubting lover — His birth at Geneva, bringing up at Berlin — Hegelian, sceptic, dilettante — Miracles of introspection ; " Journal Intime " — Loses motive for action — Struggles and repentances ; " What is it that can save us?" — Impotence of mere science — Base democracy and true freedom — " If God be no more than Category of the Ideal, religion will pass away" — The Church exists in virtue of her positive teaching — Civilisation is in danger from " doubters, phenomenists, and materialists " — Is not the best of beliefs the Christian .'' — Amiel assents, but cannot be firm to it — His deathbed confession — Its moral anticipated by Novalis, indicated by Newman — Faith is an energy which implies free choice — Creeds of despair have no light ; so-called "Enlightenment" has no strong^ — Man must find or make a religion — Ecce adsum .,*..... 102 — 119

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS xi

V. HEINRICH HEINE

PAQEB

Who was the modei-n Euphorion^ romantic and Greek ? Not Byron, as Goethe sang of him, hut " Red Harry " the Jew from Diisseldorf— Heine, child of the age and its emhodiment — His life " a hattle and a march" — Samson Heine marries Betty van Geldern — Rhineland under Napoleon — Schooldays, studies, the Witch of Goch, the League of Virtue — Heine sells Manchester goods on commission — Falls in love — At Gottingen and Berlin — The " Reisehilder " — ^Baptism of Heine — His " Book of Songs " — He is an " unfrocked Romanticist " — The Jewish Renaissance of the nineteenth century — Enchanted "Prince Israel" — ^Young Germany — Heine in Paris — "Ueher Deutschland " — Rehahilitation of the flesh—'' Last Poems " — ^Neither Jew nor Christian — Can there he a " Religion of Humanity " without God ? — Euphori'on dies, his poet's singing-rohe a winding-sheet . 120 — 167"

VI. THE MODERN FRENCH NOVEL

Decline of the stage, from soul to scene-painting — Novel an expanded drama — Richardson inspires Rousseau, and his ''Confessions" give the key-note of French literature, romantic or realist — Phases of the same movement — Chateauhriand — Victor Hugo, a French ^schylus, not an Athenian — To him the enormous hecomes the suhlime — Quasimodo, Esmeralda, Fantine, Gilliatt, Jean Valjean — " Obey impulse " — Society is the criminal — How far that indictment true — From despair to revolt — The army of "doubters," frivolous or melancholy — George Sand, her pedigree, Bohemian life, passionate rhetoric, versatile temper — "Sacrament of adultery" and "path of suicide " — Meaning of Romanticism — French limitations in language and thought — George Sand as a landscape painter — Stories of La Vallee Noire — Peasant farming ruins the Forest of Ardennes— No inspiration for George Sand in Paris — Hugo and his age on their defence ; "Nature" was set up against the classics of Louis XIV., is now invoked as giving the lie to "Hernani" and "Ldlia" — ^But Rousseau stiU prevails . , 1^8 — 19& xii SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

VII. FRENCH REALISM AND DECADENCE

PAQBS

Debates touching the origin of Realism — ^Diderot its ancestor, but Balzac its Grand Master — ^The question stated in terms of Sophocles and Horace — Balzac's fancy, language, art of composition — His world a struggle between passions and interests — ^The " Human Comedy " ; its centre, Paris — ^Worship of Money, like Fate in the old Greek plays — ^Balzac delights in the abnormal ; nothing; sacred to him — His monomaniacs — Belief in ugliness, cruelty, and the triumph of the bad — ^A seer like Lucifer — His "persons" are only "forces," yet more than Zola's accidental gatherings of refuse — Flaubert attempts " objective fiction '' — His debt to Chateaubriand, to Gautier — A master not of literature, but of writing — "Madame Bovary" — Flaubert's atheism, contempt for "the human beast," irony in " A Sentimental Education " — The " rags of Telephus " more picturesque — The Goncourts — Enter Zola : his method, which he terms scientific photography, is selection of the unpleasant — Its singular untruthfulness — Realism brings forth decadence — Alphonse Daudet— Protest by Octave Feuillet in "La Morte" — M. Bourget — "Un Disciple" — The last word Pessimism — End of a civilisation '. 196 — ^236

VIII. PIERRE LOTI.

Contrast between works like the " lUad," which are impersonal, and the " Confessions " of St. Augustine or of Rousseau— Amiel and Loti belong to the lyric, self-regarding, order— Loti not Parisian— His truth, vision, and feeling— French Huguenot by descent, he passes

over, with Calvin's disciples elsewhere, to philosophic nescience

Youth in Saintonge ; eifect of discipline ; the Bible as an education — " A Child's Romance " — ^Desires to be a missionary— Reads A. de Musset, loves the sea, enters School of Marines — "The Marriage of Loti"— Rarahu— Pilgrimages in Stamboul— Journey 'to Fez and Mekinez— "Ivanhoe" in Africa— The doom of Jean Peyral— Japan

SUMIMARY OF CONTENTS xiii

PAOBS

during autumn ; its " sombre golden dream " — ^Brittany in the "Fishers of Iceland," Loti's most delicate and triumphant story — The Celtic heart — Aiming at philosophy, Loti has attained but to sadness — Its dangerous deceits — Passive enjoyment, passive contemplation ; but where is free will ? Nature alone remains — Silence in 'the Heavens — yet Nature and the Bible are divine books from which Loti has drawn his best things .... 237 — 270

IX. NEO-PAGANISM

Goethe in the "Venetian Epigrams" has celebrated the Dance of Life — He is leader of all New Pagans — ^Taught by Lessing, Winckelmann, Schiller, that creed was heralded by critics — Ruhnken, Wolf, Heyne, — The secret of Goethe's culture — Kant after Spinoza divides the ring of light from the primeval darkness — Goethe no Christian ; yet he declares that man will never outstrip the Gospels — ^The ^' Creed of Nature," a stream which flows from no source to arrive at no issue — The unknown Gods — Reaction after Waterloo — Romantic school largely an affectation with medieval "properties" — Heine prefers Olympus— rGautier the French Pagan — His beautiful style, sham vice, indifference to character and personality — " Correction of form is virtue," he says — Hatred of Christian ethos — Colour-symphonies — Pictm'es from Cairo, Constantinople, Seville, Granada — His poetry a " Pantheistic madrigal " — ^This hieratic worship of beauty, not spontaneous, becomes a mannerism — ^The New Pagan often a mere scholiast — But Leconte de Lisle something more, an " unimpassioned Creole," yet an ardent mystic — He reproduces the lost originals of Athens or Lesbos — And goes beyond them to the Indian East — His "assurance of mortality" — Man is swallowed up in unconscious Nature — Goethe would not agree with De Lisle ; the heart of existence for man is man himself, as illustrated in "Wilhelm Meister," and even in "Fausrt" — De Lisle's "Antique Chants"— The "Gods in Exile" according to Heine— Pan is dead— Two forms xiv SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

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which Hellenism may assimie— Both extant in Plato's " Dialogues," the sensuous and the spiritual — Decadence finds ancestors in Petronius, Apuleius, the Greek lyrics— Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil"— His "Artificial Paradises "—Nero as an artist— Richepin drives home the conclusion that science, ethics, progress, and the very idea of " laws and causes " are bound up with religion — Hence "affirm all or deny all"— The "Bitter Sonnets" — A view of HeUenism which leads up to the New Testament — Goethe's " Dance of Life " is painted on a funeral urn 271 — 308

X. LATTER-DAY PAGANS

These opposed and conflicting elements in antiquity brought out by Euripides and Lucretius — Modern instances — " Art and self-indulgence " — Two biographies : one real, J. A. Symonds ; the other not imaginary, " Marius the Epicurean " — ^Experiments on our behalf — Symonds' family record, childhood, religious terrors, aspirations towards the beautiful in painting and books — ^Theocritus, Shelley, the "Phsedrus" and the "Symposium." — ^Balliol College and Professor Jowett — Scholastic triumphs, illness, travel, doubt, wasted years — "Stoical resignation. Epicurean indulgence" — ^The "persuaders of death" — An Opalstein — PUgrim to Athens — "The Renaissance in Italy," its defects and misapprehensions — Michael Angelo — Symonds recants — Literature gives way before democracy — Hymn of Cleanthes — ^The Protestant cemetery in Rome — A better lesson from "Marius" — Not atomic scepticism but "Pax Deormn" — From " ideal form " to " recognition of transcendent power " — ^The admirable artist, unwearied in rejection— Pater's first creed in "Essays on the Renaissance" — Inversion of means and ends — Ludovico Sforza — Marius decides not to be an Antinomian — The Spartans — How shall the Church deal with art ? — Reconcile the Fair and the Good— St. Augustine "De Ordine "—Cupid and Psyche — "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius — Mass in the Catacombs — Martyrdom— True and False Platonism . , . , . 309—342

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS xv

XI. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

PAQES

The Polish refugee — " I say No " — Lonely great man — Lutheran forefathers — At Naumhurg — The Landschule at Pforta — Bonn and its Professors — Schopenhauer — Loss of Christian beliefs — Birth of Greek Tragedy — Dionysus, Apollo, and Socrates — " Unseasonable Reflections " — Music of the Future — " Joyful Science " — Kant's " Critique '' criticized — ^The Will to Power — Nietzsche's admirable style — His wanderings — " Beyond Good and Evil " — Huxley's Romanes Lecture —Is Christianity the religion of Decadence? — Auguste Comte — " Thus spake Zarathustra " — Bible of Positivism — ^Whither is , evolution marching, and what is its law ? — ^That is the question of science .... 343—378

CONCLUSION— "The Two Standards" 379—380

INDEX OF PRINCIPAL NAMES 381—383

THE SCHOOL FOR CRITICS^

First, as the Greeks would say, acknowledgments are due to that Power which has bestowed on Professor Saintsbury the vigour, perseverance, insight, and opportunities whereby he can now look upon his opus magnum, the story of criticism, as a thing accomplished. Jt is done, and well done. Hardly another man living could have dared so large an enterprise ; and who would not have fainted in the long journey, which in depths and heights may be thought Dantean, from the Greek dawn of literature to the twilight or sunset of the nineteenth Christian century ? Three volumes, two thousand pages, authors beyond reckoning ; " the best " and " the rest " whom our critic summons before his judgment-seat ; add the problems of style, matter, purpose, that break in at side-entrances ; the dates and personal issues ; the audience itself, creative genius here, ideal spectator there, and the general reader, who cannot be turned out once he has made his way in. It is the "Review of Reviews " sublimated to a quintessence, the Great Exhibition of critical products, set out by one hand, but filling court after court with samples and trophies from the chief Western languages, every one duly ticketed and priced. Certainly our English architect rivals "the almost frightful laboriousness of Bouterwek and Eichhorn," much as these excited the astonishment of Carlyle. His leading,

' 1. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe. Vol. III. By George Saintsbury, LL.D., 1906. 2. Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. By S. H. Butcher, LL.D. Third edition, 1902. 3. Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects. By the same, 1904. 4. Dramatic Criticism. By A. B. Walkley, 1903. 6. Sainte-Beuve. Par Le'on S^che'. Tomes I., II., 1905. 6. Correspondance de Sainte-Beuve avec M. et Mme. Juste Olivier. Par Mme. Bertrand. Notes, etc., de Leon S^ch^, 1905.

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inexhaustible, minute, always at command, would have charmed the melancholy Burton, stirred up Warburton of the " Divine Legation " to ei;ivy and argue with him, challenged Buckle to a second exploration in the wastes of print ; and it may deter the less resolute from taking, as he declares every critic is bound to take, all literature for his province.

" To read, and read, and evermore to read," in books often obsolete, has been the occupation of a lifetime with Professor Saintsbury. His aim is the delight which he considers to be the true purpose of literature — delight given by the work of genius, felt by the reader who comes to it in receptive mood. For Uterature is the art of expression in words, criticism the impression it makes on that " sensitised plate " which our minds should be when in contact with it. When we know how to record the hnes and strokes of the mental photograph, not blurring them by prejudice, or overcharging lights and shadows with our private darkness, we are fit to be named critics, not otherwise. The whole art of judgment is faithful impression. Nor is any way but this conceivable, whereby to " discover and celebrate the beautiful things of literature." It is not a science a priori, with rules, kinds, qualities, measures, and limits laid down beforehand in some " Ars Poetica," whether we term the lawgiver Aristotle, or Vida, or BoUeau. The critic does not legislate, he observes ; and his observation is a feeling, the test of it enjoyment. For he is concerned, not as the philosopher with what is true, nor as the moralist with what is right or wrong in conduct, but simply with what is beautiful in the written word. Literature is, then, something which we can define as an end to itself, distinct from ethics as from metaphysics, subject to its own laws and conditions, a mode of human activity claiming its proper value. The appraiser of that value is the critic.

Unless we mistake, such is the Professor's " articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesias" in the hotly debated question that has filled so many volumes from Plato's " Phaedrus," " Symposium," and " Republic," and from the " Poetics " of Aristotle onwards to our own day. Let it

THE SCHOOL FOR CRITICS xix

be remarked, however, that for the historian of critics it is a " previous question." Professor Saintsbury, though a student of philosophies — which no Petrus Comestor of books old and new could well escape being — is on his guard against the German fault (as he considers it) of striking too high into the clouds of speculation, not less than against the opposite one, now growing much more common, of resolving poet and poetry into parish registers and laundresses' washing-bills. He quotes from Joubert, " Quelquefois un besoin de philosopher gkte tout " ; and he is inclined to flee " ultra Sauromatas " or to the ley Ocean rather than take service under Baumgarten, nay, even the greater Hegel. Yet he would doubtless agree when Professor Butcher tells his American audience that "from the outset Greek thinkers looked shghtingly on that multifarious learning which holds together a mass of unrelated facts, but never reaches to the central truth of things." Had no dramatic unity, arising by means of a strangely varpng conflict, governed the wide and scattered movements of criticism, where would be the binding interest of these three great volumes ?

But Professor Saintsbury's dislike, not to put too fine a point on it, of system in every shape, brings with it a little inconvenience. For want of clearly stated principles, there is repetition which takes up room and often reduces to the proportions of a vignette the pictures of consummate artists on which we should delight to dwell. On the opposite side, condensation is sacrificed to a humorous enforcement of the writer's view, in places and ways that, if unexpected, are not always inevitable. To complain of Uvely touches, quaint allusions, or even friskings and gambpUings, in a work derived, as to manner, from Montaigne and reminiscent of Rabelais, is not at all the drift of these observations. When the Titan scales heaven, he may do anything he will with Ossa and Pelion, provided he can get thither. But while we praise the alertness, gaiety, and defiant good-nature of this never-wearied Adeimantus, we feel that perhaps "a wider metacritic would not hurt our critic" — ^if Aurora Leigh will forgive the parody. A philosophic programme

I

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would have saved space and time, brought out the unity which underlies a discursive treatment, and let us into the secret of criticism.

However, once we have seized the clue, it becomes a pleasant game to trace through all his windings the Romantic — ^for such our guide declares himself to be — who leads us in and out and round about on a quest resembUng that of the " Faery Queen," and not less intricate or less adventurous. The giants of a false criticism must be met and overthrown : the paladins of a true theory — yes, theory it cannot fail of being, do what the author may to dissemble it — need praise and encouragement. For there is a dramatic contest, as in the creations of genius, so in the judgments on what it has achieved. If poets came first, in that Juventus Mundi to which we look for their Golden Age — an age not occurring everywhere at the same time, but consequent on those peculiar and mysterious causes whence inspired imagination takes its origin — philosophers came second, and in their train the problems of a critical inquiry into all that poets mean or ought to mean by their singing.

This is that " long quarrel," known to us well from Plato's " Dialogues," between the votary of Beauty and the disciple of Truth. It is even more. The philosopher could not but grow into a preacher ; among Greeks he was by profession a moral dignitary; and he asked whether old romance, with its legends of the gods exhibited on a public stage, did not corrupt the world which it was only too willing to please. Truth, scientific or matter of fact, murmured at the poet's " Ijdng fables." Morality declaimed against his light and frivolous, or terrible and disedifying, mjrthological scenes, which outraged a more humane conception of life than the primitive one whence they had sprung. The dispute, beginning with lonians lik^ Anaxagoras, who attacked the popular religion, rises in Plato to the height of that great argument between Puritan and Dilettante, between Church and Stage, nay, between culture and life itself, of which the forms are innumerable, the debates unceasing, the issue never long decided in favour of one or other combatant. For we are dealing with incommensurables, from which.

THE SCHOOL FOR CRITICS xxi

whatever common measure we apply to them, there is always left over an unexplored remainder.

The first brilliant piece of criticism that we fall in with among, Athenians illustrates the tangle and points the paradox recurring ever and anon in Professor Saintsbury's volumes. The critic is Aristophanes ; the victim of his cruel yet earnest sport is Euripides. One would fancy that the comic poet should allow or practise what has been known to later times as " Art for Art's sake," But not so ; he censures " our Euripides the human " as a bad citizen, a sophist, a sentimentalist, a realist, who teaches how to make the worse appear the better cause, and whose unbelief is a crime against the State. ^Eschylus, on the other hand, represents for this out-and-out Conservative the poet of heroic days, who instructs youth in all high wisdom :

And this view lingered down to Roman times, to Plutarch and Strabo ; or shall we not rather say that it never died, and is not likely soon to die ? For what is the intent of reading in elementary schools Shakespeare, Milton, Words- Worth, and other inspired singers, but to cultivate and enhance the moral sensibilities of childhood ? Poetry has ever been the " prima philosophia " of those who would turn away in disgust and despair from abstract systems. Nor did Plato condemn the use of poets as " fathers and guides to wisdom " for the young, which he permits in that choice little drama of boys at play, the "Lysis." But, when he sketched the better life that was to be, and would have built up the perfect State, his judgment became inexorably severe. The crowned and delightful poet must go into banishment. Plato's reasons, in part, are those of Aristophanes; all culture which does not make for education, moral and political, is naught. The Athenian has now become a Spartan ; we behold in far-off perspective Calvin at Geneva ; or we hear the milder Racine protesting, as by the lips pf Jansenius, that, if he writes the tale of love in "PhMre," his aim has been a warning not to indulge wickedness even in dreams. " Ce xxii HERALDS OF REVOLT

que je puis assurer c'est que je n'en ai point fait," he says of his tragedies, "ou la vertu soit plus mise en jour que dans celle-ci." Virtue alone will justify beautiful writing, these lofty prophets teach us. But the " unexplored remainder " is not thereby reasoned out of court.

Aristotle felt it, with his happy gift of looking round every problem and letting it make its own impression, whether he could solve it or not. His " Poetics," though no more than a fragment, opens the first chapter in scientific criticism, and was long esteemed its inspired or at least infallible Testament. It is still among the living things of literature, serene with a Greek tranquilhty which gives the effect of light on marble ; and if we read it for suggestions towards a doctrine of the ancient epic and drama, nothing will do us more good. Happily, too, it has been translated and commented upon by a master whose knowledge is as rare as his manner of presenting it, " lenis minimeque pertinax," is persuasive. We could not wish for an introduction more illuminating to Mr. Saintsbury's record of critical achievement — excellent as he, too, is on Hellenic subjects — than Dr. Butcher's edition of this thought-provoking treatise, , and his " Harvard Lectures," which, with his earlier essays on the " Greek Genius," complete what he has to tell us concerning Greek literary criticism.

Than the "Poetics" no work of antiquity has been more misconstrued, partly owing to ignorance, but quite as much because the author was himself uncertain of his position, tentative and elusive, not enough of a poet to allow for the " demonic," or, in later language, the " unconscious," that lies beneath intellect, creative or critical ; and, though he had been Homer's peer in that respect, too entirely Greek to feel with a different world of poetry, suppose the Oriental then, or the Romantic since. He was not prescribing how genius ought to write ; he drew from dead and famous authors examples to demonstrate how they had written ; and his rules are judgments which they seem to give, not which he imposes on them. He is not consistent, and is far from infallible. Yet he takes us a step beyond Plato ; for he sees, at last, that poetry, which kot i^oxqv is literature, cannot, as being a

THE SCHOOL FOR CRITICS xxiii

fine art, merely subserve didactic ends, but is an end in itself; its object is "to produce an emotional delight, a pure and elevated pleasure." This truth, never hidden from the great masters, found classic statement when it was most needed in Dryden : " Delight is the chief, if not the only end of poesy ; instruction can be admitted, but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it dehghts."

May, then, truth and virtue be disregarded, clean contrary to that Platonic sermon which ends to such wonderful effect the dialogue with Phasdrus ? It might seem so while we are quoting the Stagirite's judgments on poetry, appealing as they do to logic and to strictly aesthetic momenta. Yet, says Dr. Butcher, Aristotle would not " set aside as a matter of indifference the moral content of a poem or the moral character of the author." Nay, " they are all-important factors in producing the total impression " ; and, since tragedy is the imitation of life, " the pleasure he {Aristotle] contemplates could not conceivably be derived from a poem which offers low ideals of life and conduct, and misinterprets human destiny." An American scholiast — we rejoice to know that Greek studies flourish in Maryland — Mr. Carroll, has perhaps brought out the principle better than Aristotle did himself : " Morality enters into consideration," for the artist, he says, ' only as implied in the Eesthetic ideal."

But the older prepossession survives along with this more accurate judgment ; sOid rules too rigorous on their ethical side left the " Poetics " a fertile debating-ground for after-times. What shall the drama make of its hero from this point of view ? Can he be a villain, or the Prince of Darkness, and not rather morally noble, though there may be flaws in his nature ? Is the contemplated "excellence" possible in a character like, we tviU say, Napoleon, whose deeds were on so magnificent a scale, but whose principles were the reverse of " eminently good " ? The answer seems to be that moral grandeur is demanded, but that /ai/at^ctis Trpa^ews o-TrouSaias throws the quality into the action, implies a deeper universal element than we understand by such words as " ethical " and their kindred, and leads us on to the disclosure of laws which.

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in, the range and import of their bearing, do, by deliverance of our emotions from the commonplace, " lift us till we touch the spheres." Herein lies the morality of great or true literature.

Meanwhile, the point was to be unceasingly argued by critics, right and wrong, " between whose endless jar justice resides.' So, too, when the delight given is defined as " rational enjoyment," are we not left in a quivering balance of adjective and substantive ? Enjoyment we know, but what is reason ? Socrates, in the " Apology," cannot discover it when he turns to the mighty bards. " They showed me in an instant," he says, "that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration ; they are like diviners and soothsayers, who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them." It was a teaching from of old, explicitly stated by Democritus of Abdera, but far more splendidly in the Theban "Pindarus" — ^to speak Miltonically — ^that the Muse utters the oracle and her " prophet " renders it in rhyme. " The idea of the frenzied poet," observes our Harvard lecturer, " strikes us as having a strangely un-Greek air." Is not that because we set in front of our thoughts a more recent, more Attic, stage of life and literature than the remote but exceedingly grand primeval era to which Dionysus came with his revellers in the echoing glades of Cithseron ; when Apollo was first oracular at Delphi, and the vast mythologies arose that overshadowed ^schylus ? Trained skill, deliberate intellect, mark out Sophocles, Thucydides, and other men of the centre. Yet there was a mystic mountainscenery behind them to which we owe the " Bacchanals " and that choral rhythm, long imtamable, without which drama had never come to the birth.