as red or green by our sense of colour. And the mere mention of such things as a Hottentot Venus, an African lip-ring, Arabian music, even the different styles of admired personal beauty and dress in more civilized countries, or the infatuation of a lover, or a parent, all these will show that there may be beauty blindness as well as colour-blindness; that, in fact, such beauty is only subjective.

This beauty is only one of the accidents, as they are called, of material existence, just as greenness, redness, heaviness, and the like; and the fact that it excites our emotions and attracts us is to be classed with other natural facts, such as those consequent on the law of gravity, or of capillary attraction.

Taste, if I am not mistaken, is not to be the sole arbiter, but our higher Reason, which discerns the ideal truth of a representation, and in whose verdict the taste and understanding must acquiesce.

Let us see whether this is a mere groundless theory, or whether we can prove it by an example. The poet Horace, while he allows that "painters and poets always have the liberty of making whatever audacious creations they please," limits his permission. thus: But you must not place a woman's head on a horse's neck, clothe the body in feathers, and make it end in a fish's tail." Now, to omit at present the question of painting, such a combination as this has actually been made by Dante in his monster Geryon, a beast with a pointed tail, with serpent's body, and

hairy paws, with sides painted with scales and bosses, and with a face like the face of a just man." Geryon is the symbol of Fraud, and though utterly monstrous and abhorrent to our understanding is approved of by higher reason. He is no falsity; he is true to the meaning that the poet wishes to convey. He represents Fraud more effectually perhaps than any incarnation that our senses have ever perceived.

In this case taste also-the sense by which we are attracted or repelled from an object-must give way.

For what are we to say to this same hideous Geryon? What to all unlovely things? Are these to be unfit material for the poet, because our sense of the beautiful is repelled by them?

If we allow this sense-this asthesis-to estimate poetry, she will disallow much that reason justly allows; she will make us mawkish and sensual, lovers of a school of poetry and painting which nowadays is only too seductive, with its graceful, languid effeminacy and voluptuousness.

And yet, as in that divinest of Plato's dialogues, the Phædrus, Socrates veils his head in horror at having been induced to speak words of blasphemy against Love and Beauty, and hastens forthwith to offer reparation in a glorious palinode, so would I hasten to speak, as best I can, of a beauty, and a love for beauty, infinitely removed from sensuous idols and emotions: a beauty inseparable from eternal truth, and one with it; a loveliness which we can love and adore

as well as recognize; than which adoration and love, as Carlyle has told us, no worship is more authentic. If, therefore, we are to allow a love for beauty to judge of poetry, and the creation of the beautiful to be the end of poetry, we must separate this love wholly from the mere sense of material beauty, from our taste or æsthesis, from our sensitiveness to attractive forms. We must, in fact, be strong enough to receive the new gospel of love; and then we may enthrone love above all mere duty, all mere recognition of truth. In this sense of the word I think we may entirely agree with what sounds almost a paradox of Goethe's: "The beautiful," he says, "is higher than the good: the beautiful includes the good"-the truly beautiful, that is, which, as Carlyle quaintly says, "differs from the false, as heaven differs from Vauxhall." With this higher meaning of beauty in our minds, we can now without scruple say that in all art, and in poetry especially, the struggle or aspiration towards supernal loveliness or perfection is the only true motive: and this harmonizes exactly with what before we defined as the object of the true poet-namely, to reveal the secret of nature; for that secret is ideal loveliness, beauty and harmony lying at the heart of all existence.

Now that I have tried to explain what I hold to be the true end of art (and I would here repeat that such theories are of merely subjective value), let us turn to the more practical side of the question, and consider the nature of an art creation, and some of

the methods by which the poet effects his end; and also contrast to some extent these with other artistic methods such as those of painting and sculpture; merely premising here that each art (as, indeed, every other agency) has its special powers and its peculiar sphere, within which it will find its highest development; whereas, if it invade another sphere and endeavour to usurp other methods than its own (as is often the case in, for instance, allegorical painting, picturesque poetry, and perhaps also in the uses to which music is put, both on the stage and in the church), then it abandons and loses its own special powers.

First, let us consider the poetic form of thought, the habit of mind with which a poet approaches, and grasps, and models his subject; and then the minor question of the material in which he finally presents his creation—that is, his language, metre, rhyme, and the like.

"The appropriate business of poetry," says Wordsworth, "is to treat of things, not as they are, but as they appear, not as they exist of themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions." Shelley, too, calls poetry "the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds." That is true. It is the record of a mind. Does he mean the record of mere emotion, the record of the mental state, or of passion? Does he say that? No. It is the record of a mind

in its happiest, best, most tranquil moments, when mere personal self-centred emotion has passed; when reason and the diviner perceptions have regained their sway; when the turbid stream has clarified itself. Therefore we find Wordsworth once more defining poetry as the record of "emotion recollected in tranquility." I cannot but think that Dante's words have a similar meaning-namely, that the impression made by emotion on his mind was recollected and sung of by him in after, more tranquil, moments :·

"Io mi son un, che quando

Amore spira, noto: ed a quel modo

Ch' ei detta dentro, vo significando" (Purg. 24. 52).

"I am one who, whensoever Love inspires me, mark it; and in that measure which he dictates within me, singing go."

At the moment when we are under the influence of deep emotion, when our heart is overflowing with sorrow, with joy, or with indignation, we are apt to lose sight of the inner meanings of these things. The sorrow, the joy, is everything to us; the mere emotion is everything; the true meaning of what has fallen to our lot is not recognized.

Now, when the feelings are in this turbid untranquilized state, we can indeed, by the display of our inconsolable grief, our inexpressible happiness, or even by the display of self-restraint and stoic indifference, excite the sympathy of others in these feelings. Tender and loving such sympathy often is