Homer constantly uses such introduced scenes A warrior fights ferociously. He is likened to a lion, and then follows a description of a lion-hunt in the midst of the clamour and tumult of a battle. The warriors collect for battle, or for an assembly; forthwith is introduced a picture of gathering flocks of cranes, or geese, or swarms of bees.

Indeed, when we come to look closely into almost any passage of true poetry, we shall find how this capacity for "movement" is taken advantage of by the poets. What some critics-especially French critics. -have called the barbarous luxuriance of Shakespeare in crowding image upon image, simile upon simile, is merely the most highly developed result of the exercise of the poet's legitimate powers.

There is still another point. The same "motion" that is necessary to true poetry, while it prevents the poet from painting beauty in its vivid material colours. and motionless statuesque shapes, likewise prevents his pictures of unloveliness, of ugliness and horror, from assuming a too repulsive form. Venus enraged would be repulsive in painting or sculpture. In poetry her anger merely serves as a contrast. She is soon lovelier than ever, smiling through her tears. In pictorial art such scenes are repellent, and are inadmissible. Such are many of the hideous pictures that may be found in our galleries, more especially those belonging to the French school. Such are many illustrations of books, as-to take the most

flagrant example-Doré's illustrations of the "Inferno."

But for the poet nothing is common or unclean. The strength, the supremacy, of poetry lies in her extension. There is no continent of knowledge, no ocean, sea, or streamlet of emotion, over which her empire does not extend. Hers is indeed an empire on which the sun never sets, a boundless realm, such as she claims in Schiller's well-known lines, which may be thus roughly translated :—

"No confines limit me, no fetters bind :

I freely soar wherever space can reach.
My empire is the endless realm of mind,
My winged minister is human speech.
All things that deep in Nature's secret lie

Must be unveiled and unsealed for me;
All life is mine that moves in earth or sky,
For boundless is the power of poesy."

This liberty of the poet (which, as all true liberty, is not mere unbridled license but has laws of its own) to some might seem destructive of that unity of outward form, which is requisite in a work of art. This introduces us to not only the question of unity of idea in a poem, but also to that of the three dramatic unities of time, place, and action, considered necessary by the classical writers. But these subjects I must defer to another occasion.

Let us here consider for a few moments a device which is not unfrequently used both in poetry and in the pictorial arts-I mean Allegory.

What do we mean by allegory and allegorical art? Every true artistic creation, as well as every reality in life, represents an idea. This idea is generally also representable in other forms,-in an intellectual form for instance. Now, when a work of art does not by its mere existence as an artistic creation represent the idea, but we are by some external trait artificially reminded of, not artistically inspired with, such idea, then I should call the method allegorical. By being artificially reminded I mean that some artifice draws our attention from the artist's work (which should itself inspire us with the idea) to some other form, often intellectual, which we are accustomed to use as the medium for the idea in question. Thus, for instance, a character in a poem is not allowed to fulfil its function by its mere artistic existence, but it must have external traits appended to it which shall (so to speak) label it as representing what under an intellectual form we conceive of as virtue or vice.

It is this false method to which I would here limit the word allegorical.

The only condition under which such allegory is admissible in art is that these appendages shall be of the simplest character, and such as have by habit become associated with the object described (as, for instance, wings in pictures of angels), so that they seem naturally to belong to it; as Homer's epithets by constant recurrence become almost connected with his substantives.

Of all useless undertakings perhaps the most profitless is that of those who spend their energies in "unweaving rainbows" woven by poetic genius. It is an easy matter to discover an allegory in every reality, whether of life or art; but to transfer the idea to another form, such as an intellectual, is as difficult as it is for the chemical analyst to re-form a diamond from its component elements. It needs a creative power, which of all men the critic or the commentator, as a rule, possesses least. And even when the artist himself attempts the recreation of his idea in an inartistic form, he naturally fails.

The allegory of the "Fairie Queene" has been most fully, and with anxious exactitude, explained by the poet Spenser. Tasso rewrote, and in rewriting spoilt, his great epic in order more distinctly to state its allegorical meaning. In our days Tennyson has allowed (for it was done, I believe, with his approval, if not by his express wish) his "Idylls" to be “explained" in the same way; and we are asked to believe that the real value of these poems lies in their allegorical meaning.

Now why is it that we do not, and rightly do not, believe this? It is because, as has been already said, every true creation of the artist is in itself a reality, no less than every reality in life, and because they are so by virtue of the idea which by their mere existence they represent and we receive their message by accepting them exactly as they are placed before us.

As soon as the artist abandons his special power of creating such realities for us, and has recourse to other methods, we rightly resent it. I think this explains (for me, at least) the invariable feeling of dissatisfaction which allegorical pictures, sculptures, and poems, and a corresponding class of music, produce.

The age of Spenser, which was that also of Tasso, was one in which allegorical art (if one may use such a contradiction in terms) was practised to a ridiculous extent. The fact that such men as Raphael and Shakespeare and others were not more affected by this false taste of emblematics, only proves their greatness; though Raphael himself sometimes gives way, and Shakespeare allows himself to introduce on to the stage such a figure as that of "Rumourpainted full of tongues."

The following description of a portrait of Harpocrates by Vasari (the biographer of Italian artists and himself a painter), is quoted by Sir Charles Eastlake, "I have made him with very great eyes and ears, wishing it to be inferred that he saw and heard much. . . . He has a crown of cherries and medlars, the earliest and latest fruits, to represent judgment. He is girded with serpents, and places one hand on a goose, to indicate vigilance,”—in reference, I suppose to the vigilant geese which saved the Capitol from the Gauls.

And of another portrait he says, "The round stool on which Alssandro de' Medici sits indicates