HEART OF MAN

BY

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

COPYRIGHT 1899, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

1899

"Deep in the general heart of man"

--WORDSWORTH

TO THE MEMORY OF

EUGENE MONTGOMERY

MY FRIEND

DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'TWERE TO ME, ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT;IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT

February 18, 1899. 

PREFACE

OF the papers contained in this volume"Taormina" was published in the _CenturyMagazine_; the others are new. The intentionof the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics, and religion are the flowering of the samehuman spirit, and have their feeding roots ina common soil, "deep in the general heart ofmen. "

COLUMBIA COLLEGE, February 22, 1809. 

CONTENTS

TAORMINA

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY

DEMOCRACY

THE RIDE

TAORMINA

I

What should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-villageto fascinate me? Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in thedarkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see thepale tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar borneup and softened about these heights; and this is night at Taormina. There is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality ofmystery; and at evening, I know not why, I cannot sleep without steppingupon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. Atmorning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights aboveme. I glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelopEtna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seekthe double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand athousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearerheight, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruinedcitadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock towardits right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The otherhorn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the oldcastle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of ahamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over thesehilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often theydarken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill thenext-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank ofMonte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking theother day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my facedown this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from thecloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined theprofound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm whichdelights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothicmoods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure ofrecognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in theSicilian landscape. 

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a strangeranywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is notonly from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come. When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountaintops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is theretoo, --that which I have always known, --but marvellously transformed andheightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in theoffing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, Ihave beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather ofcloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those stilltracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours ofnoon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pureemerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of whathas been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination formy eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm ofmist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making anear horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashesof purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. Allday I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herselfhas taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beatsthe pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hourbefore dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion isconscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comesthe recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, ofEtna. "

The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it isthe habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have neverknown; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and drawnourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over thevalleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it isnot a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, orride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass likeAtlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is uponEtna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer theclear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again itdraws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sendsit forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides itsface: it is the Sicilian winter. 

II

But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in thisseason. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring backthe sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped inimpenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casementand stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling cloudsspreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of thesnow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villagesand groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between laythe plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away. From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more thantwenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the westernfringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; solarge a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does thedistance of the stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed snows, and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow moundsinnumerable. A thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain. How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the peer of the sea andof the sky. All day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and Irejoiced in the sight, and knew why Pindar called it the pillar ofheaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud. 

III

Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since Etna gives a fair, pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur ofTaormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it thesmall temple with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. It issuch a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none evercommanded a more noble prospect. The far-shining sea, four or fivehundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on eachhand is disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces therising sun. To the left and northward are the level straits, with theCalabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as theCape of Spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in frontexpands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bayand beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the greatblue promontory of Syracuse makes far out. On the land-side Etna fillsthe south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languidcone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over theintervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, and, next, tothe round solitary top of Monte Maestra, with its long shorewarddescent, and comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with itshermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet furtheroff, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of MonteVenere, with Monte d'Oro and other hills in the foreground, andnorthward, peak after peak, travels the close Messina range. 

A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majesticallygrouped, grand in contour! Yet to call it sublime does not render theimpression it makes upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, anddull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; butconstantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwellsunwearied with the soul. One may be seldom touched to the exaltationwhich sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habitof one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes thislandscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, itsperpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather, and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether theeye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearerfeatures, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill of mystation falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and thenbecomes the Cape of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea. Yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance andstrongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of Sant' Andrea, andbeside it a cluster of small islands lies nearer inshore. On the otherside, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, thevillage of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the whitemain road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands. The port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of Schiso, whereancient Naxos stood; and just beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plainand flows to the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' Andrea, is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eightmiles away, the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the shore viewwith a mass of rock that in former times completely shut off the landapproach hither, there being no passage over it, and none around itexcept by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. All this ground, with in several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the Alcantara, andbeyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of Taormina. 

The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore andthe gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut outinto the air like capes. The northern one of these is my station, thesite of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one oppositeshows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the town circles between, possibly a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long broken lines ofthe ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothictower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, standout among the humble roofs. Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam likeoblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. Ifyou will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close by, whichoverhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of thetown at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with theplants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and thegate toward Messina. 

The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where the main ravine ofTaormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, areterraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rockpermits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every lesssteep slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and olive treescling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothethe country. It is gray to look at, because of the masses of naturalrock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of theterraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone. The only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear, whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, andoften extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green tothe scene. This plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man'sheight, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. Acloser view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those atmy feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or runover the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in theprevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray ofTaormina--this is the scene. 

Three ways connect the town with the lower world. The modern carriageroad runs from the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind thenorthern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santobelow and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until it slowlyopens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous coursesabove the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. Thesecond way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward Etna, and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southernspur, with Mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill)closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrentof Selina, in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridgebetween the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, withhere and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or asportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coignof vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sandsby the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the mainroad. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and ahill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge;one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts thecastle. 

This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor, how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silentbeauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. Thistheatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end bygreat piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thickstrewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendourand populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns inposition in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yetwhole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with thelong southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame. Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. Theenclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held manythousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by theroadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square Ientered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and theround arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation andmouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over thefountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally amermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters Icome on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the facesof the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see theruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookoutbelow was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff overGiardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tentspitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, butnow the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in theCasa Timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken fromits ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, Timeo?

IV

I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keepthat I should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but I findthere are paths innumerable. Leap the low walls where I will, I come onunsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. They ran down thehillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, likethe branching streams of a waterfall. Some are rudely paved, and hemmedby low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the mostunexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye andfoot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. Themultiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, forhere one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfection. Every fewmoments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on theRiviera or at Amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovelypictures. The infinite variety of these views is not to be imaginedunless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by merechange of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone andcolour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from dayto day, with the unsettled weather. 

Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty whichis the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went upand down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or keptthe cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into thevales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by thegushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make somediscovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday Ifound the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, suchas I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the easternshore of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchardsyield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, andeverywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples underthe slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always alandscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of SanNicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down thehollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in adell that is like a nook in the Berkshire hills, and then along theupland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I cameout through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slowimplements on the gray or party-coloured stone. I passed through therather silent group, who stopped to look at me, and a short distancebeyond I crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to the shore. I found it strewn with seaside rock, as a hundred other beaches are, butnone with rocks like these. They were marble, red or green, or shot withvariegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined; and thesea had polished them. Very lovely they were, and shone where the lowwave gleamed over them. I had wondered at the profusion of marbles inthe Italian churches, but I had not thought to find them wild on alonely Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had seen a block rosy inthe torrent-beds, and it had seemed a rare sight; but here the wholeshore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful stone. 

I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these marbles. Overthirty varieties were sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won theprize. I got this information from the keeper of the Communal Library, with whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory the ship thatHieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It hadtwenty banks of rowers, three decks, and space to hold a library, agymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towersfor assault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many ingeniousmechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required forits construction. I describe it because its architect, Filea, was aTaorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archimedesin his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galleyhe used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian toldme also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean, which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; butnow, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour. 

The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But themullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that oncewent to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure aslong as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancientmemory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is statedin Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout theMiddle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of thestraits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally castup on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina. 

The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveriesin the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination, more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I hadstrolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room forthe road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, alow roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come fromthe breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a morepiercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grandmusic of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, andreechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemedthe voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in thatlonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and hadbecome resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in thePsalmist's song. It seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought overhow many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted uponit as they passed to their death on this shore. I came back slowly inthe twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathingon me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted likethe bright December breezes of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna onmy cheek. 

V

Will you hear the legend of Taormina?--for in these days I dare not callit history. Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had not hoped torecover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in whichpatriotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating their dearcity. I was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that thetown authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger theselittle paper-bound memorials of their city. "But, " he said, "I told themI had given you my word. " So I possess these books with a pleasantassociation of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with real interest. As I turned the pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is toknow the past. The past survives in human institutions, in thetemperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in thelast is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race ispushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one datewith man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at thelast with them. Least of all does the past survive in the livingmemories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless airpreserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; so the mind of manholds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins andfragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of booksin my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find anarrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirringdeeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowyfigures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousandyears of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will set down. 

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a Taorminian, whoflourished in the last century. He was a man of vast erudition, andthere is in his pages the Old-World learning which delights me. He wasborn before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. To allegean authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers whorepeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. Rarely doeshe show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _Scriptalittera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances tobe at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminishhis authority. He was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and didimportant service to Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded toaffects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A fewstatements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb themodern mind, but I own to finding in them the charm of lost things. Inmy mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, thelake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science;but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up onquite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins withthe flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to goback with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, whenthe children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in hersearch for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched outunder these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say thatTaormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it mustbe acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, likeall doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place theSiculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits fromItaly and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communitieslived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warredconfusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so calledbecause the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble abull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves. 

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before ourera. It is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the strand. This was their firstland-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, doubtless, thealarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers ofthe world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the darkisland for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not alwaysbefall. Then quickly rose the lowland city of Naxos, and by the riversprang up the temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of theSicilian Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperousvoyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. They were from thefirst a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grewheavier on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward fromMessina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries ofgrowing states--battles dimly discerned now. A single glimpse flashesout on the page of Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messeniansthreatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from theheights in great numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, androuted the enemy and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear andbright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few relics of thatage, that Pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish thegovernments of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a madlover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and atMetaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? But atlast we see plainly Alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fatedAthenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxostoward Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her glory. And then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over, the Greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out under thefoot of Dionysius the tyrant. 

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and ourcity (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stoodits first historic siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snowand ice--I can hardly credit it--whitened and roughened these ravines, anew ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by afalse security in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hoodedthe hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbedunobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outerforts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the soundof arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, andfought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with woundssurrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with Dionysius among them, hardpressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. This was thecity's first triumph. 

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you notremember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been hisimmortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of allthose that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizensaccording to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion andenmity to all tyrants. " Was the defeat of Dionysius the first of hisyouthful exploits, as some say? I cannot determine; but it is certainthat he gathered the surviving exiles of Naxos, and gave them thisplateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as hadbeen the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A fewyears later Andromachus performed the signal action of his life bybefriending Timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarchrecords the glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the summonsof his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, thentyrannized over by the second Dionysius; and because Andromachus, in hisstronghold of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave Timoleonleave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat ofwar, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the Corinthianforces and to assist them in the design of delivering Sicily. " It was onour beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth tothe conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as heprayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship overthe sea. The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, where hehad eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and fromtheir vessels they parleyed with Andromachus in the port. With aninsolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning itlightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturnthe little city; and Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered thatif he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. TheCarthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. Timoleonprospered, brought back liberty to Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, andgave to Sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of herGreek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the little temple on ourheadland, the Greek theatre where the tongue of Athens lived, thegymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struckher coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape;Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the gods and templesof the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and withthe rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But ofAndromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek citythat then rose, we hear no more--a hero, I think, one of the true breedof the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant, Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city byfriendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and hedrove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He, evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historianwhom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up tohis time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolishedin style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression. Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history, and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, andfrom their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent forinvective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part oftruth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, and is creditedwith being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seekexactness in it. He never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easilyforgive to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour with which hedepicted the crimes of Agathocles and others of the tyrants. In ourcity, meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarionruled; and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invadingpower of Carthage. But he was little more than a shedder of blood; heaccomplished nothing, and I name him only as one of the figures of ourbeach. 

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung onthe horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead ofSyracuse and Messina, Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent themforth, and over this island they encountered. Our city, true to itsancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read inthe poem of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the titleof a confederate city; and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges whenin that famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of ourSicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the Roman praetor byoverthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, asthey said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that to write this town'shistory were to write the history of half the Mediterranean world. Whenthe slaves rose in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on thishill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the Roman consul ashardily as was ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, andvindictive. With horror Monsignore relates that they were so resolvednot to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, andone another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed andmassacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I cannot feelregret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to theiroppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit to remember thatthe slaves, too, fought for liberty. I am sorry for those penned anddying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horriblefor their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did towhat they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated hadstripped them of humanity. After the slave, I make room--for whom elsethan imperial Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and hethought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. But Taorminawas always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege. Then Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of GuidingApollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beachafterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen, said the diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, aftermany turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. Pompeyreturned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was foughtand Augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. But when a third timethe trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeiansruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent itsinhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman colony in its place. Latinwas now the language here. The massive grandeur of Roman architecturereplaced the old Greek structures. The amphitheatre was enlarged andrenewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as inCampania, and coins were struck in the Augustan name. 

The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and whereshould the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? Asof old the Greek torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soilwas the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many temples about thehill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but ifthe monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victoryrather over three strange idolatries, --the worship of Falcone, ofLissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to believe that thecitizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to Falcone;and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except thattheir destruction marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio wasthe name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through thecoming centuries. He was born in Antioch, and when a child of threeyears, going with his father into Judea, he had seen the living Christ;now, grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the gospelin the isles of the sea. He disembarked on our beach, and forthwiththrew Lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon whichwas coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and heshattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and so Taorminabecame Christian, welcomed St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered onthe long new age. It was here, as elsewhere, the age ofmartyrs--Pancrazio first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither withhis mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered with his onehundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano withtheir sixty; the age of monks--Luca, who fled from his bridal to live onEtna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-mindedDaniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there is more to be recorded;the age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium, of whom two only are of singular interest--Zaccaria, who was deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once agreat figure in the disputes of East and West; and Procopio, whom theSaracens slew, for the Crescent now followed the Cross. 

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of Africa. The Saracenswere in the land, and every city had fallen except Syracuse andTaormina. For sixty years the former held out, and our city for yetanother thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of theimpending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia alreadymentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners andmorals of the citizens. I am sorry to record that Monsignore believedhis report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "Thecitizens, " says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming toa state of war. They saw on all sides the fields devastated, housesburnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends andcompanions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, that did not rule unpunished among them. " Therefore the saint preachedthe woe to come, and, turning to the governor, Constantine Patrizio, inhis place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people. "Let the philosophy of the Gentiles, " he exclaimed, "be your shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious _condottiere_, strictly restrained himselffrom intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, was valorous through the same continenceas Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one overthe Spartans, the other over the Carthaginians, and both erectedimmortal trophies. " He promised them mercy with repentance, but endedthreateningly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you allthat has been divinely revealed to me. If you believe my words, likethe penitents of Nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise myadmonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worstslavery. " He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the house of anoble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying inbed, he said to him: "Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I now lie?In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and thewalls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons ofthis city all together put to the edge of the sword. " Then he left thehouse and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standingthere, he lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "What does this thingmean, father?" The old man had his answer ready, "Now I see rivers ofblood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you seeexalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the Saracens. " Andthe monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and wentoverseas. 

The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always havebeen where the prayer for defence against the Saracens had gone up for ahundred years in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken painsto add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessfulattempt to take the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond thestraits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as theSaracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son, "He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother andnot from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his swordwould not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to thehome government, and came himself and sat down before the city. Thegarrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following oldchronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age, sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would exposethem to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy wareven to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zealinspire the citizens. " Ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. Hefirst corrupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were afterwardcondemned for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, hepromised some Ethiopians of his army, who are described as of aferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city forbooty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the boldundertaking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Monsignore's ownwords:

"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of theTaorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitorsentered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mightycries and clamour assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, havingentered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of the Saracens, raged against the citizens withsuch unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weaknessof sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even theabundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched topity that ferocious heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful andwealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizensaccording as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground themagnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all thatwere proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that noteven the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survivedthey gave to the flames. "

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one the Taorminianscherish as the culmination of their past. In the Greek, the Roman, andthe early Christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and itshistory attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; whileits station as the only Christian stronghold in the island wouldnaturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. In this first sack ofthe Saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destructioncould hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of thechurches themselves, in their present state, show Byzantine workmanship. 

There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim'svictory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturallycompassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In themidst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns ofthe hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was theBishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, "Because youare wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey myadvice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of yourcompanions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens havesuffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christianreligion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be moredear to me than all the Agarenes. " The prelate only smiled. Then, fullof wrath, the king said: "Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Knowyou not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly, " came the answer, "because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words intoyour mouth. " Furious, the king called to his attendants, "Quick, breakopen his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand thesecrets of his mind. " While the command was being executed, Procopioreproved the king and comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollenwith rage, and grinding his teeth, " says the narrative, "barbarouslyoffered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it. " Then he bade themstrike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies alltogether. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon intothe sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; andIbrahim, having accomplished his work, departed. 

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; andbeing now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of thecurious in such things. "I foresee, " said the discomfortable saint, "that within a few days you will die. " And to make an end of St. Eliawith Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of pietyto his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils, or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, theold monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliffinto a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, bymaking a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was amind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to chargepoor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over themountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do. Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to theGreek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens, but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians inthe possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treatyit was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night. Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victorsinto slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city ina campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swiftdisaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and thenow thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may wellbelieve that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of thecity was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia. 

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing ofCount Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, whorecovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to itstradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultorywarfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surroundedit with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by rampartsand bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day heinspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid anambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had avery narrow passage over the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, ashe was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their criesattracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief'speril, threw himself between, and died in his place. Count Roger was notforgetful of this noble action. He recovered the body, held greatfuneral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. Thestory appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it inboth prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and theiron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is asign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopricand was ecclesiastically annexed to another see. 

Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert;but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for fivehundred years to come. It was like a rock of the sea over whichconflicting billows break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal storyof internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order setup monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is nowleft but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend thelibrarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left. Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learning, but their deeds and virtues may sleep unwakedby me. The kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again, Messenian foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go unrecorded. I mustnot, however, in the long roll of the famous figures of our beach forgetthat our English Richard the Lion-hearted was entertained here byTancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me name at leastthat which the city suffered for its loyalty to the brave and generousManfred when the Messenians surprised and wasted it, and that which withless destruction the enemies of the second Frederick inflicted on it, and that of the French under Charles II, who, contrary to his word, gaveup the surrendered city to the soldiery for eight whole days--a terriblesack, of which Monsignore has heard old men tell. What part the citizenstook in the Sicilian Vespers, and how the Parliament that vainly soughta king for all Sicily was held here, and in later times the marches ofthe Germans, Spaniards, and English--these were too long a tale. Withone more signal memory I close this world-history, as it began, with anoble name. It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi set out forItaly in the campaign of Aspromonte; hither he was brought back, wounded, to the friendly people, still faithful to that love of libertywhich flowed in the old Taorminian blood. 

I shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leafit is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race hassplashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It isonly a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such acity, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of humanfate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres ofhistory; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awedby the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no throngingof illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperialcrime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. Again I use thefigure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of theMediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on byevery pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch ofGreece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greekdemocracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law andfeudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in allits historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviateat moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down intothe streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The menwill hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop toask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaksnot of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but ofthe destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. There is, as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate andbetter-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among themsuffering is widespread. Three thousand years of human life, and thisthe result! Yet I see many indications of a brave patriotism in thecommunity, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, tostimulate, to encourage--the spirit of free and united Italy awakeninghere, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promisedblessings. And for a sign there stands in the centre of the poorfishing-village yonder a statue of Garibaldi. 

VI

The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, and clear, and everyhour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. It is not spring, butthe hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day thereare new flowers--not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarserof fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking intofoam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white andsolitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is thefaint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it--butit is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds ofrunning water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on ourcape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying of the smoothdeep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the roughclefts, or I loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats, weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: and always I bring back something formemory, something unforeseen. 

I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. It isblessed not to know what the gods will give. I remember once in otherdays I left the beach of Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast wasrounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came bya country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared andpassed, I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow--a figure out of old Italianpictures, some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. I haveforgotten how the isles of the Sirens looked, but that boy's face Ishall never forget. It is such moments that give the Italy of theimagination its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A day ortwo ago, when the bright weather began, I was threading the rough edgeof a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a littlefarther on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; butstraightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, thegarments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like aflash--_eccola_ the country of Theocritus!

I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that onelearns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments, manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures andruins--this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; butthough I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had myreward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the lightwhich travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except thatstronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imaginationwhich comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindredphysical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily bemore narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiartemperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and commonto all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, andwhatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for ourpossession may be an important part of life. I think none can fullytaste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, untilhe has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and inthe case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much ofwhose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is verygreat. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed howsubtly Dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part ofnature. I own to believing that Virgil's storms never blew on the seauntil once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came astorm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted--such masses ofragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken withrapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, suchan indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! Thewaves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf camethundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms. "Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the childrenof Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set andrise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. Thewinds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, oreven as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, andshatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confusedand broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and byshowers of iron hail. "

I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible inwords, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of theimagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet hereI find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at timesfrom the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak ofCapri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopesthe shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then thecenturies rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morningnotes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. Iread the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet withwherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with roundedforms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, ordripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The runthat comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemonbranches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of themill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying onthe campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the coldstream, --"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from thewhite snow, a draught divine, "--each of these seems inhabited by agenius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But allalike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real. 

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. Noidyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that ofthe two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to theshore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the sameimplements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often asI look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their headsover the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily onthe sands. 

"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they hadstrewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there layagainst the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of theirtoilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, thesails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-potswoven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors'caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold hadnever a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemedsuperfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour bythem, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea. "

This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl istouched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It isa terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs andhand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. Howlong has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishersand gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before usthe hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, andmaidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor oldmen. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now asthen. With the rock and sea it, too, endures. 

A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not farfrom here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after thefleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which hepiped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now Ilet the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds ofHerakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to itscivilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in thecampagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would Irecover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "everystone upon the way spins singing, " make what speed I can, I come not tothe harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flockscrop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on mylips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer:"Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam--dearHesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than themoon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now isthat ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missingDaphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. Sweetwas his flute's first triumph over Menaleas: "Then was the boy glad, andleaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawnleaps about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory when hestrove with Damoetas: "Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended hissong, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautifulflute. Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon thecalves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither won the victory, but both were invincible. " And him, too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might "become a song in the ears of all menunborn, " even for their love's sake; and prayed, "Would, O FatherCronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and thatwhen two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me byAcheron, the irremeable stream: the loving-kindness that was betweenthee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men's mouths, andchiefly on the lips of the young. " Hill and fountain and pine, the graysea and Mother Etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, asonce about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in of the spring, contending for the prize of the kisses--"Whoso most sweetly touches lipto lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother. Happy is he whojudges those kisses of the children. " Lost over the bright furrows ofthe sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as Moschusbeheld her--"With one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, and withthe other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trailand be wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the border-landof mythic story, that was then this world's horizon, yet more faintlythe fading voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles. Faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, vaguely I hear them; atlast there remains only "the hoar sea's infinite spray. " And will yousay it was in truth all a dream? Were the poor fisherman in their toilalone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a localhabitation and a name? It was Virgil's dream and Spenser's; and somesecret there was--something still in our breasts--that made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longingtenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softenedwith sweet thoughts. 

And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her poet. Perhaps none who will see thesewords ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Fewof his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to havebeen the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian warbetween Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epicpoem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, hadthe entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held thesecond place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, ofwhich fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, whichSeneca quotes, saying of him, "No one out of so many talented mendeplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus. " Somedialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. Thesefragments may not he easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; and, ifit be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at thevery end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of thelength of a book of the "Georgics, " called "Etna. " This is the work ofCornelius Severus. An early death took from him the perfection of hisgenius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wroteso well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy ofVirgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion. 

VII

It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise from my oldstation by the Greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and mengathered on the distant beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bedof the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I wished Iwere among them, for it is their annual fair; and still I dwell on everyfeature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. Theafternoon I have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easyclimb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where itgoes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silentcountry! There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard nobird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other side of thewall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to thecliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a narrowstream, deep below me, but I see the women of Mola washing by the oldfountain which is its source. There is no other sign of human life. Thefresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all Ihave of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I goup, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter thestony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldomseen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all itsinterior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in aprison, and silence over all--that is Mola. The ruins of the fortressare near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barrenspot--a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over thebattlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks onlybirds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on allsides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, andcannot be surprised at its record of defence. 

Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and itwas the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the sonof Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I donot doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that thiswas the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist arepart of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to theSaracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood fornigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold ofwar. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more thanonce, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untakenand unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story;but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its famenow, and my last tale of the Taorminian past. 

He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when the Messenians revoltedagainst the chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed over thiscastle; and when a certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracyto murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given intoMatteo's charge, and imprisoned here. The Messenians came and surprisedthe lower city of Taormina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuadeMatteo to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to overcome hisfidelity cruelly. They took his wife and children, who were at Messina, threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. Then they sentMatteo's brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count knew thereason of the visit he said: "It seems to me that you little value thezeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neitherknows how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and children would look onme with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the rewardthat sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselveswith innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, butthe heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse. " Then he wassilent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo wasalready escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword inhand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save hiswages, " struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead inhis blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else inthe castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowlyfading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes. 

VIII

Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear thelong roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers' lights, andEtna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darknessI seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur ofmany tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lostOscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman andSicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharpbattle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, thedeath-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on thehard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercerpain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. Myfancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock thetriple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in theage-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, andSicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lonehill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surgestill lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. Ihave wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovelyparadise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has pouredforth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcaniceruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all thatEtna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of herburnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deathsat once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowedon this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain heresuffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man shouldfear! He should fear his brother-man. 

IX

The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, as I came out todepart. In the dark street I met a woman with a young boy clinging toher side. Her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom wasscantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and herfeet. She was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met minewith that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; thechild, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. Whatbrought her there at that hour, alone with her child? She seemed theepitome of the human life I was leaving behind, come forth to bidfarewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. The last starfaded as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed whiteand vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as I dipped down, wasgone. 

A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY

There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us rather return unto thesoul. Nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man whoknows it. In what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thyself, was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing whenthe sweet influences of the Pleiades and the path of Arcturus with hissons were young in human thought. These late conquests of the mind inthe material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, thisnew mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude ofachievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vividspectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in humanwelfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing fromunsuspected and illimitable resources, --all this has made us forgetfulof truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances ofthought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures. Man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creaturebut made in the likeness of something divine. The lapse of aeons touchesus as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, andman's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of ourmould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical beingwe now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human pastwithout some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, andsome proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowledgeis of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer ofhorses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twinguardians of the soul, --the poet and the priest. Conscience andimagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the humanspirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged theirtreasures, there is wisdom. I desire to renew the long discussion of thenature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which thiswisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for therace in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literarytradition and association, a proud task. May I not take counsel ofSpenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney and Shelley pleaded thiscause. Because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble examplebe put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips?The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain speak for thatlearning which has to me been light. I use this preface not unwillinglyin open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and themasters I then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent;my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from oldfountains; but chiefly I name them as a reminder that the main argumentis age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thusceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warringnature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on in the lives as well ason the lips of men. It is a question how to live as well as how toexpress life. Each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but, change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of hisfew great thoughts. 

The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them togetherin a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age. Continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wantingin the work of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and consignsthem to dark closets. New times, new weapons, is the history of allwarfare. The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from anyintellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than onequarter passes into denial. Literature and the other arts of expressionsuffer throughout the world. To that point is it come that those of theold stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty atits highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bidstep down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs toliterature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, theobliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shallwe learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? Ihear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods--

 Di quibus imperium hoc steterat;

but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was saidthat though one rose from the dead they would not believe, --Plato, beingdead, yet speaks, Shakspere treads our boards, and (why should Ihesitate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. Thatwhich convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages isstill convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yetunbroken; therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to setforth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason onwhich idealism rests. 

The specific question concerns literature and its method, but its importis not mainly literary. Life is the matter of literature; and thence itcomes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probefor their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issuesto the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to think of idealismas a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters intimatelyinto the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live atall except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neitherspeculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men mostshould heed. I fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truismsthan paradoxes. But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To belearned in commonplaces is no mean education. They make up the greatbody of the people's knowledge. They are the living words upon the lipsof men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matterof the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries;the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily, --happy the youth whosepurse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country andfor every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when itarises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty, --familiarityendears and makes it more precious. What is common is for that veryreason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divinesurprise which most enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring firefrom heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the flint at his feet?How often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of HolyScripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debrisof memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, orinterpreted the sweetness of God's sunshine in the happy heart! Commonas light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truthand love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it andgives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heartto understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and electricity, --were not all, like the spark, within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankindthrough ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul inlaying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strengththat are nigh unto it. The service of man to man in the ways of thespirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of coldwater to him who is athirst. 

Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is thatof all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, sofar from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to thelogician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that increating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought;and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds ofgravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given tothe mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, ofimpressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and werememory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this ofparticular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the solemethod of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literaturewould then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments intheir order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. Inevery object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and isgiven by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and inits relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and thislikeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex ofexperience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifiesparticular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions, --abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in thecourse of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speakof white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size, --ofuniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classificationof qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuousbut in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies itsexperience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. To thiswork it brings, also, the method of experiment. It then interferesarbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that topass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses toinvestigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirmwhat was surmised. Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals moreor less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought asopposed to the units of phenomena. The body of these constitutesrational knowledge. 

Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retinaof sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for thesenses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, butreason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be atevery moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenalplane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizingfaculty whose operation has just been described. The office of thereason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in thatexperience which memory preserves in the mass, --to penetrate, that is, to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when theyarise, must put on. The species once perceived, the mind no longer caresfor the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for thefacts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in their significance. All sciences areadvanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriatematter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportionas there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated andsystematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physicsdownward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals itdeals with, as these are more or less embracing. 

The matter of literature--that part of total experience which it dealswith--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature wherealone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginativeliterature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast asdistinguished from the outward and physical order with which sciencedeals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in thisgreat tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man oftrue knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesseshim of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology andmetaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Suchknowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence tomankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge;for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with themind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with everyother sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selectedminds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method ofthe mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishesits work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with theuniversal; its end is to know life--the life with which literaturedeals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessaryorder, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, notwithout relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; andits instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciencesand of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty. 

One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth, --adifference in the mode of statement. Science and also philosophyformulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid themind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that itreembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to theeye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw anexample from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination theplanet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universalqualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doinghe created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in hisimagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of realityin the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of theconcrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reasonworking in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribedis sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind, in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows. Theterm is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect ofwhich the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect theimagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on theone hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, andto disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrationalfancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject tothe laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannotamalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie andretain its own nature. The use of this rational imagination is notconfined to the world of art. It is only by its aid that we build up thehorizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and eventsbeyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted for our knowledgeof the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth'ssurface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and itsscene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before manwas. So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of ourprivate experience of it, we do so by the power of the imaginationacting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us throughall their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits ofmen. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecastsreform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizesin fact; the entire future lives to us--and it is the most importantpart of life--only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise inemploying it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that heuses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. Insome parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physicalparallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imaginedstate of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conceptionof the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is atissue of abstract thought. In art this governance of the imagination bythe reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter aseeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on theuniversal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form. Butin the light of this preliminary description of the mental processesinvolved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment inliterature. 

Human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action. Of these, character, which is the realm ofpersonality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character;action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is idealaction. It is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. Atype, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualitieswhich make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in thiselementary form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect;and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in allspecimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute thetype. Comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of somesingle human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. Thebraggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which iscommon to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only isshown. In proportion as the traits are many in any character, the typebecomes complex. In simple types attention is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself. Thisis the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, of Marlowe. As human energydisplays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mindcontemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusiveidentification of character with specific trait, a more free conceptionof personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex, types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery ofhumanity as something incompletely known to us at the best. Such are thecharacters of Shakspere. 

The manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in otherarts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature. The sculptor observes in a group of athletes that certain physicalhabits result in certain moulds of the body; and taking suchcharacteristics as are common to all of one class, and neglecting suchas are peculiar to individuals, he carves a statue. So permanent are thephysical facts he relies upon that, centuries after, when the statue isdug up, men say without hesitation--here is the Greek runner, there thewrestler. The habit of each in life produces a bodily form which if itexists implies that habit; the reality here results from the operationof physical laws and can be physically rendered; the type isconstituted of permanent physical fact. There are habits of the soulwhich similarly impress an outward stamp upon the face and form socertainly that expression, attitude, and shape authentically declare thepresence of the soul that so reveals itself. In the Phidian Zeus was allawe; in the Praxitelean Hermes all grace, sweetness, tenderness; in thePallas Athene of her people who carved or minted her image in statue, bas-relief, or coin, was all serene and grave wisdom; or, in the glowingand chastened colours of the later artistic time, the Virgin mothershines out, in Fra Angelico all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, inRaphael all motherhood. The sculptor and the painter are restricted tothe bodily signs of the soul's presence; but the poet passes intoanother and wider range of interpretation. He finds the soul stamped inits characteristic moods, words, actions. He then creates for the mind'seye Achilles, Aeneas, Arthur; and in his verse are beheld their spiritsrather than their bodies. 

These several sorts of types make an ascending series from thepredominantly physical to the predominantly spiritual; but, from thepresent point of view, the arts which embody their creations in amaterial form should not be opposed to literature which employs theleast interrelation of sensation, as if the former had a physical andthe last a spiritual content. All types have one common element, theyexpress personality; they have for the mind a spiritual meaning, whatthey contain of human character; they differ here only in fulness ofrepresentation. The most purely physical types imply spiritualqualities, choice, will, command, --all the life which was a conditionprecedent to the bodily perfection that was its flower; and, though theeye rests on the beautiful form, it may discern through it the humansoul of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may berepresented in some significant act, or mood even, but this last israre. The more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are mostoften shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soulwhose habit lives in the form it has moulded. It is not that the plasticand pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as wellas humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they revealcharacter, but within narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts inembodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though itsprings out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiarway. It is not the employment of a physical medium of communication thatdifferentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the onlymeans of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment ofa physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physicalbasis--the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. Thephysical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enactedon the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thoughtor ocularly. 

The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and theirkindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life onlypartially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. They set forththeir works in the single element of space; they exclude the changesthat take place in time. The types they show are arrested, each in itsmoment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is asuccession of such moments of arrested life. The method is that of thecamera; what is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life inmovement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on theretina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. It holds underits command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it canchase mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak the word, which is the most powerful instrument of man. Hence the types it showsby presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction ofmatter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the mostcomplete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place. They exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue andsoliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying, or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. Actionby itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon theaction also a forward and a backward light. The lapse of time, bindingall together, adds the continuous life of the soul. This large compass, which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command andmore flexible control which literature exercises over that physicalbasis which is the common foundation of all the arts. Hence it aboundsin complex types, just as other arts present simple types with morefrequency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind andinterpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are nowconsidered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to expresspersonality. 

The type, in the usage of literature, must be further distinguished fromthe bare idea of the species as it has thus far been defined. It is morethan this. It is not only an example; it is an example in a high stateof development, if not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance, does not exist in nature, owing to a confused environment which does notpermit its formation. In literature a type is made a high type either byintensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex. Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are thecharacters of comedy; a rich nature, such as Hamlet, showing variety offaculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama. This truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay theold canon that the characters of tragedy should be of lofty rank, greatplace, and consequence in the world's affairs, preferably even ofhistoric fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means of securingcredible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. The endin view is to represent human qualities at their acme. In other times asa matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit suchdevelopment; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrainedand conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of humanenergy, passion, and fate. New ages brought other conditions. Shakspererecognized the truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis where itbelongs, upon the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of theman. Said Henry V: "I think the king is but a man as I am; the violetsmells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth tome; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, inhis nakedness he appears but a man; and though his appetites are highermounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with like wing. "Such, too, was Lear in the tempest. And from the other end of the scalehear Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurtwith the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the samemeans, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christianis? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh?if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we notrevenge?" Rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that thetype be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity andrichness be what they may. 

It is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is atbest but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination ofabstracted qualities. There was never such an athlete as our Greeksculptor's, never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal toHomer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to hisfoe, so loving to his friend. And yet is it not thus that life is knownto us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall inwith the natural habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to usexcept by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our own, is known tous as a continuous existence. Just as when we see an orange, we supplythe further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply fromourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuouslyhuman. Moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, weourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at onemoment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both inconsciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, ifa character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was livingso, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, thepriest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature would notdiffer from the actuality of our experience. In this selfsame way wehabitually build for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and livingmen, by dwelling on that part of their career which we most admire orlove as showing their characteristic selves. Napoleon is the conqueror, St. Francis the priest, Washington the great citizen, only by thismethod. They are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types ofimagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily, but consistently, presented. 

The type must make this human appeal under all circumstances. Its wholemeaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, inthe clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, inthe force with which it identifies us with human nature. If it isseparated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it losesintelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more anobject of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown. Even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or theangelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind. Thesespheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of itssense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstractionthough concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivableexcept as they are human in trait, however the conditions of theirnature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with savethose of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways notjustified by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the limits ofrational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partialinterpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beingswho inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree towhich their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of completehumanity. For this reason in dealing with such simple types, beingnatures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to importinto them individually some quality widely common to men in addition tothat limited quality they possess by their conception. Some touch ofweakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmeritedmisfortune in an Ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as thefrailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke. Thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with thewhole of life in ourselves. 

Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical orpurely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality, express human character in its essential traits. They may be narrow orbroad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, thosetypes, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the mostvaluable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they arespecialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion as theyescape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, and present maneternal and universal in his primary actions, moods, and passions, theyappeal to a greater number and with more permanence; they becomeimmortal in becoming universal. To preserve this universality is theessence of the type, and the degree of universality it reaches is itsmeasure of value to men. It is immaterial whether it be simple as Ajaxor complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination solely as inHercules, or have a historical basis as in Agamemnon; its exemplaryrendering of man in general is its substance and constitutor itsideality. 

Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot. Itlies, as has been said, in the region of experience. Character, thoughit may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as itfinds outward expression. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It embodies orreveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character, are the record of past acts. This act is the link that binds type toplot. By means of it character enters the external world, determiningthe course of events and being passively affected by them. Plot takesaccount of this interplay and sets forth its laws. It is, therefore, more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned withthe man in himself. It is, initially, a thing of the outward as type isa thing of the inward world. How, then, does literature, through plot, reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form?

The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of natureindependent of man, in part the product of his will. It is a continuousstream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporalsequence. Science deals with that portion of the whole which isindependent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerningcausal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principleof unchanging and necessary order in nature. Science seeks to reduce themultiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simpleformulas of law. Science does not begin in reality until facts end;facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law whichcontains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found. Literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same wayas science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conceptionof spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of thesoul. This causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which bydefinition is a series of events causally related and conceived as aunit, technically called the action. Plot is thus analogous to anillustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law, --itis law operating. 

The course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connectionwith human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual'sown will, or of that of his environment. The will of the environment maybe divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of othermen, and the will of God. In each case it is will embodied in events. Ifthese ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totalitywhose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout itand called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which, as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant. Action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly powerworking through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunctionwith its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in itcharacters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they areonly terms in the action; however free they may be apparently, considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allowentire certainty of result, its mutations are included in thecalculation of the Divine will. The action of the Aeneid is of thisnature: a grand series of destined events worked out through humanagency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven andearth. On the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowlyattended to within the limits of the individual's own activity, as theexpression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then thesuccessive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of thecharacter which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action, so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of events therearises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of hisenvironment, whether nature, man, or God, then the seed of tragedy, specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea oftragedy. In all these varieties of action, the scene is the externalworld; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causalprinciple, obtaining in it. 

It is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement of the matter. The course of external events, in so far as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, andhas meaning as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outwardindeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotionwhich make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interestinghumanly only as a mirror of them. It is not the murderous blow, but thedepraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not themuttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse workingitself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law ofcharacter outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seenrequires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. Allfiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, theintimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from theearliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwellsupon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:--

 "'Tis very true, my grief lies all within; And those external manners of lament Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells in silence in the tortured soul; There lies the substance. "

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing allart: "The best in this kind are but shadows. " So Hamlet; so Prospero. 

Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far asthese are physical, their law is one of the physical world, andinterests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong inthe inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and hashuman interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The externalfact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is ofthe unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within ourown bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this isthe case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they aremerely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, theyare dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as ourexperience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world ofemotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a worldof character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret ittherefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion tillabsorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor'sgenius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he whomakes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scenethat it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without anyillusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves. 

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through ourown hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret theexternal signs of sense in terms of personality and experience knownonly within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe toour nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something neverseen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them isnot only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even withinits limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we livein, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like untoourselves abides, --the human soul, though never seen face to face. Toenter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life assensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things ofpersonality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the outward order isbrought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within. 

In thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a singlesoul is externalized, one important element has been excluded fromconsideration. The causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has adouble unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as astate of mind and a state of external fact. Under one aspect, so muchof the action as is included in any single life and is there a linkedsequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of thatindividual. Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forththe relations of all the characters involved, of their several coursesof experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, hasits unity in the constitution of the universe, --the impersonal order, that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will, which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he mustaccept without appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, towhich man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadestconception the power that increases life, and all things are under itssway. Its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as immutable law inhimself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a partof the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, socialgroups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, thedrama, and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere is the higherunity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one mainaction. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between manand his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to befreed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though wesay that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of thesoul's life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will ofGod, we do not escape from the outward world. Sense is still the mediumby which only man knows his brother man and God also as through a glassdarkly, --

 "The painted veil which those who live call life. "

It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element in which thepure soul is submerged. 

It is necessary only to summarize the characteristics of plot which aremerely parallel to those of type already illustrated. Plot may be simpleor complex; it may be more or less involved in physical conditions inproportion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; it mustbe important, as the type must be high, but important by virtue of itsessential human meaning and not of its accidents; it is a fragment ofdestiny only, but in this falls in with the way life in others is knownto us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must retain humansignificance and be brought back to man's life by devices similar tothose used in the type for the same purpose; it rises in value inproportion to the universality it contains, and gains depth andpermanence as it is interpretative of common human fate at all times andamong all men; it may be purely imaginary or founded on actualincidents; and its exemplary interpretation of man's life is itssubstance, and constitutes its ideality. 

In the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature of the world ofart, which was originally stated to be the characteristic work of thecreative reason, or imagination acting in conformity with truth, hasbeen assumed; but no reason has been given for it, because it seemedbest to develop first with some fulness the nature of that inward orderwhich is thus projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the frailtyof man that he seizes with difficulty and holds with feebleness the pureideas of the intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed fromsense; and he seeks to support himself against this weakness by framingsensible representations of the abstract in which the mind can rest. Thus in all lands and among savage tribes, as well as in the mostcivilized nations, symbols have been used immemorially. The flag of anation has all its meaning because it is taken as a physical token ofnational honour, almost of national life itself. The Moslem crescent, the Christian cross, have only a similar significance, a bringing nearto the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. Asymbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as ametaphor does to the thing itself. In literature the parable of themustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifiessymbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur'sknights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, liesallegorical method. Idolatry is the religion of symbolism, for the imageis not the god; Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ isGod incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truthmade manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied inits characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction ofthought, symbolically or allegorically. 

The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it maybe useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogywhich has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientificexperiment. If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course ofnature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certainothers eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motionto the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In aperfect experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is a likeselection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as todisclose the working of that order which obtains in man's life. The lawmay be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a briefway, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many charactersin an abundance of action over a wide scene as in Shakspere; in eithercase equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life ofwhat shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it inaction. The process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. Thecommon method of all is to present the universal law in a particularinstance made for the purpose. 

In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers notransformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essenceof type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universalityin the particular instance. There is a sense in which this general truthis more real, as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which thephenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomenacome and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man'sbreast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form ofideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in ustransitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, thatthe mind strives for in idealism, --this organic form of life, the objectof all rational knowledge. Types, under their concrete disguise, arethus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in everybranch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are onlya part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in usingthem, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differin appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itselfof that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mentaleffort and loads conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is notpersonal, but human character that interests the mind; in plot, it isnot personal, but human fate. 

While it is true that the object of ideal method is to reach universals, and reembody them in particular instances, this reasoning action isoften obscurely felt by the imagination in its creative process. Thevery fact that its operation is through the concrete complicates theprocess. The mind of genius working out its will does not usually startwith a logical attempt consciously; it does not arrive at truth in theabstract and then reduce it to concrete illustration in any systemicway; it does not select the law and then shape the plot. The poet israther directly interested in certain characters and events that appealto him; his sympathies are aroused, and he proceeds to show forth, tointerpret, to create; and in proportion as the characters he sets inmotion and the circumstances in which they are placed have mouldingforce, they will develop traits and express themselves in influencesthat he did not foresee. This is a matter of familiar knowledge toauthors, who frequently discover in the trend of the imaginary tale awill of its own, which has its unforeseen way. The drama or story, onceset in motion, tends to tell itself, just as life tends to develop inthe world. The vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the curiousexperiences of genius, and occasions that mood of mystery in relation totheir creatures frequently observed in great writers. In fact, this modeof working in the concrete, which is characteristic of the creativeimagination, gives to its activity an inductive and experimentalcharacter, not to be confounded with the demonstrative act of theintellect which states truth after knowing it, and not in the moment ofits discovery. In literature this moment of discovery is what makes thatflash which is sometimes called intuition, and is one of the greatcharms of genius. 

The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently here upon arelated though minor topic, is also the reason that it expresses morethan its creator is aware of. In imaging life he includes more realitythan he attends to; but if his representation has been made with truth, others may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. It is the markof genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmentarily, but in the whole. So, in a scientific experiment, intended to illustrateone particular form of energy, a spectator versed in another science maydetect some truth belonging in his own field. This richer significanceof great works is especially found where the union of the general andthe particular is strong; where the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. Ina sense he is more real than living men, and we can analyze his nature, have doubts about his motives, judge differently of his character, andvalue his temperament more or less as one might with a friend. The moreimaginative a character is, in the sense that his personality andexperience are given in the whole so that one feels the bottom ofreality there, the more significance it has. Thus in the world of artdiscoveries beyond the intention of the writer may be made as in theactual world; so much of reality does it contain. 

Will it be said that, in making primary the universal contents andspiritual significance of type and plot, I have made literaturedidactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? If it is meant by thisthat I maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily beadmitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its wholelife in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession of truth. But ifit be meant that abstract or moral instruction has been made thebusiness of literature, the charge may be met with a disclaimer, asshould be evident, first, from the emphasis placed on its concretedealing with persons and actions. On the contrary, literature fails inart precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly such a teacher. Secondly, the life which literature organizes, the whole of human naturein its relation to the world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, thecreative reason, grasps it in its totality. The moral aspect is but oneamong many that life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, humour, and terror; and inliterature any one of these may be the prominent phase at the moment, for literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but all thereality of life. Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense of theword only in proportion as type and plot are distinctly separated fromthe truth they embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these areblended and unified. The fable is one of the most ancient forms of suchdidactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, andanimals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has thetouch of humour inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing atbeing men; but the very fact that the moral is of men and the tale is ofbeasts involves a separation of the truth from its concrete embodiment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. In the Oriental apologue anadvance is made. The parables of our Lord, in particular, are admirableexamples of its method. The characters are few, the situations common, the action simple, and the moral truth or lesson enforced is socompletely clothed in the tale that it needs no explanation; at the sametime, the mind is aware of the teacher. In the higher forms ofliterature, however, the fusion of ethics with life may be complete. Here the poet works so subtly that the mind is not aware of theillumination of this light which comes without the violence of thepreacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect is wrought morethrough the sympathies than the reason. In such a case literature, though it conveys moral with other kinds of truth, is not open to thecharge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit andabstract. The educative power of literature, however, is not diminishedbecause in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by itsvery definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginativea character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it mayteach, as has been said, what the poet never dreamed his work contained. 

If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter ofliterature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and theparticular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of typeand plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an orderedworld for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in thesame way as he knows nature in its living system--if this be so, whatstanding have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life?who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, andthe ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? They deny art, which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for assoon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question ofvalues, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score ofactuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, theaccidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stoppingshort of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ noother than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it whatabstraction is to logic and induction to natural science, --the breath ofits rational being. Those who hold to realism in its extreme form, as arepresentation of the actual only, behave as if one should say to thephilosopher--leave this formulation of general notions and be contentwith sensible objects; or to the scientist--experiment no more, butobserve the course of nature as it may chance to arise, and describe itin its succession. They bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, nothought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, nofabric of the reason. But there are no such realists; though purerealism has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is usually foundmixed with ideal method; and as commonly employed the word designatesthe preference merely for types and plots of much detail, of narrowapplication, of little meaning, in opposition to the highly generalizedand significant types and plots usually associated with the termidealism. In what way such realism has its place will also appear at alater stage. Here it is necessary to say no more than that in proportionas realism uses the ideal method only at the lowest, it narrows itsappeal, weakens its power, and takes from literature her highestdistinction by virtue of which she grasps the whole of character andfate in her creation and informs man of the secrets of his human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, and the end of all his spiritualeffort and aspiration. 

I am aware that I have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is allegedthat there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, toovarious in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such anexposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yetthere would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delightsin order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed untilit finds this order; and in the progressive integration of itsexperience into an ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure tothe intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous andextrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artisticwork as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fullycomprehends. Such works, we say, have form, which is just thisinterdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to theintellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though theorder they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delightit, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thusstill have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man woulddelight to dream his dream. But it is not necessary to take this lowerline of argument. 

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in thesoul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent anduniversal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common beingin all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysicson the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to theidentity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, ofcommunication between man and man, on the hypothesis of any radicaldifference in the experience and faculties to which all expressionappeals for its intelligibility; neither could there be any system oflife in social groups, or plan for education, unless such a common basisis accepted. The postulate of a common human nature is analogous to thatof the unity of matter in science; it finds its complete expression inthe doctrine of the brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentallydistinguished from race as was once thought, it is only as element isdistinguished from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the postulateof an order obtaining in the soul, universal and necessary, independentof man's volition, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, isparallel with that of the constancy of physical law. A rational lifeexpects this order. The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that ofnatural law, by experience; in the social world--the relations of men toone another--and in the more important region of our own nature we learnthe issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world;in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledgeof, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the lawsoperant in our being, as well as those of the physical world. Literatureassumes this order; in Aeschylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is thisthat gives their work interest. Apart from natural science, the wholeauthority of the past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests uponthe permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known by man; thatvirtue makes men noble and vice renders them base, is a statement withoutmeaning unless this order is continuous through ages; all principles ofaction, all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on thisfoundation. 

So near is this order to us that it was known long before science cameto any maturity. We have added, in truth, little to our knowledge ofhumanity since the Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came beforescience, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is nearand vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, withoutKepler's laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires firstwhat is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, andhis fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the laterdevelopment of science is that our senses, as used by science, are moremental now, and the object itself is observable only by the interventionof the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instrumentsinto which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as wellas our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to rememberin an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, thatmore and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever largerplace in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more andmore what it is--a savage conception. But recognizing the great place ofmind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthlysystem, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art andmorals. I find in this penetration of the order of the world within usour most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue ofsharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls havebeing only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world. 

What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we areimmersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and moveand have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's lifeoutvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand ourconception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order oftruth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one functionof the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We knowthis order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certainchoices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and otherchoices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, actingunder the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to dothe one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine inconscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joyattends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect ofbeauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity. What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may belearned in any of them--as an order of truth in the reason, as an orderof virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an orderof beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life, --ithas one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses, --isequal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains himon every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannotwander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without amoral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after purejoy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. Thecourse of action that increases life may be selected because it isreasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may sayfearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that arejoyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, andall else shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order iswhat literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in itsgeneralizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of inthe region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in theprovinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue andknowledge, and its method is the same in all. 

Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in thoserelations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highestimportance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, andonly thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary andpermanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together, exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is strong inproportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act;his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strongin the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each severalfield of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect liesin a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in theirlogic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realizesuch relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable ofeffectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the stateof error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an examplefrom one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of ordistrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintainhimself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law untohimself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge, the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinctionthrough the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage bystage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and tomost more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to acceptarbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his ownintelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceivesit, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is whythe imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for socialcrime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whateverreason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relationsof the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has noeffectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or overhis fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine thatall sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possibledepravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true ofthe mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vitalnature, in organic relation to the whole of life. 

These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, butare in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result inthe single soul in which they find their unity as various energies ofone personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise amongthem in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetectedby the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful inreality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and thepride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of theinward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seempleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; toassert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live asif all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour ofthe mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. Torepresent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thusmisrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton'simagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet giveshim; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed todepict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedlytakes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he issurprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs upin his own form there, as the "grisly king, " he mourns most his beautylost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiendsacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations ofart it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, andjoy should he preserved. 

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, soconstituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even inthe latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, andin some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in thosewhich touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptionalcalamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it oftenbreaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a moresettled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case wasreversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily intothe physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in thespiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to itsdegree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development andgrowth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in partprophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is thetouchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in bothworlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it ispower of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and theconception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is themost daring of human thoughts. 

The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embracethese other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which hasthus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its naturein the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, thoughgeneralization remains its intellectual method, it does not make itsdirect appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creativereason in its intellectual process employs that common method which isthe parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man'sfaculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yetto come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass ofmankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially onthe unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does notconfine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has asecond and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristicof it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springsthe sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdomas reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form bythe plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and sheimposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight--

 "Virtue in her shape how lovely, "

which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doersaware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believedwith their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenanceunveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her. 

The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequatelybody forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude ofour nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness;and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the morefundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life inthe soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the idealto that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall;under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of thepassionate lover. As truth, again, --taking up in his earliest days whatseems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and atall times, --under the image of the golden chain let down from thethrone of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal andits descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as itspassive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man inthe act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of thesoul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined andrationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of bythe special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth theenthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of thewhite and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In thesevarious ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truthand beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mindand heart; and, as he developed, --and this is the significantmatter, --the poet in him controlling his speech told ever moreeloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion withwhich he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which hasfastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern intruth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effectthe most important reconciliation ever made in human nature. 

So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are toldin the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us tolift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray ofthat outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to theheart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue withtrue desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and thephilosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew geniusin the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, thenoble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, thedivine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under theSyrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which hassince shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness whichneeds only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more thanthe habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men aresaved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellenceby noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground ofgain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embracethe right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possessonly an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desireto put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these areof a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming toimplacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it firstcomes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of thosethey grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this isAchilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it werelittle to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were notawakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their ownplay, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creativeimagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often moreabsorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectualsignificance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart towhich it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes holdof youth. 

What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses somuch in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It isthe keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in thearch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls itforth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictestsense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured spaceand appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuousorder, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far asa fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought, --the mood, theact, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outwardthing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing;what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is toplot, --its cardinal idea, --that the necessary harmony of parts, thechime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable asfate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe asfate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristicunity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, sobeauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in thevisible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceivedby the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes ofperception; but within the limits of the relativity of all ourknowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, andthough the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line andcolour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges causeand effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not inbecoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external, independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is thisoutward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting addin their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in thepurely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is inthe realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring itsCreator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast uponnature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality thereabiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into thebrook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of itsgeneral delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form asabstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic formand is included in it. 

The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, theidea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is sosimple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carriedover to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomenaarise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. Thusin the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beautyof music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, iscomposed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as wouldconstitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blindand deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in thesesenses is proved. Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisibleand inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of thebeauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of thebeauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty ofa demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so muchdescribe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm is moreintimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visibleloveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may beas close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer thanlife and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It is this charm, whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseenlight, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be onewith this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the bodyof things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with itas the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, andits effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue. The act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of thesoul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. Emotion isthe intermediary between the divine order and the human will; itresponds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other, and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the newbirths of the spirit. 

The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in thepresence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made tofix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion feltin the presence of reality. One principle of difference is sought in thepoint that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entailsno action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; thewill is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal seriesof events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or paintingby the impossibility of possession. The world of art is thus thought ofas one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. It is true thatthe imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that thewill does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply anyradical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it theconsequence that the will does not act at all? Checked emotion, emotiondying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplationas a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in humanfigures where there is no thought of any other possession than thepresence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphereof impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is acommon refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate unknownhabits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new worldonly, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest oflife. Why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, beregarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus farappeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being thanlife itself?

The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response mustbe kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at thesame time. In literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of thecharacter or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of highfeeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may beshown in the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, or in thevarious moods of a rich nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it bepredominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the sameway and for the same purpose as other materials of life. What happenswhen literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? Itinforms the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of theinevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respectto these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon thisknowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. So, whenliterature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us ofthe nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value incharacter, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; itbreeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative;and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once uponthis knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. Concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in usa similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselvesfeel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportionas we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as ourown individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises ofhatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terrorin the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in ourhumanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital way than throughideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived thelife. Literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally thanintellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred inus habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized ourhearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, withresolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and intheir noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as itought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all itspossibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. This is theservice which literature performs in this field. Imagination shows us ascheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in itsgeneral connection with life, in simple, powerful, and completeexpression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out fromthe sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessibleto emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, tofeel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In allliterature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action oremotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience ofemotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vitalpreparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually intomen's bosoms. 

Two particular phases of this educative power should be specificallymentioned. The objective presentation of emotion in literature, as hasbeen often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as doesalso the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion inintense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type andimportant plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinarylife, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimatethe petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of ourcareer; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, andavoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. And, secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the pointthat by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, and become one with man in general. This is an escape; but not such ashas been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is noescape for us, except into the lives of others. In nature it is stillour own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are stillaware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of thethwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental inthe poetic temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of--thepain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. But inpassing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking onourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, weleave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die toourselves in order to live in lives not ours. In literature, sympathyand that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other livesare most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with ournature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit inall things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not needgeneralization, it is the same in all. It is rather a means ofuniversalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantiveidealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, especiallydeals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, theelementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectualcontents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as themaster-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us thanknowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies moredeliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules, as it influences in all. It is natural, therefore, to find that itsoperation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectualfaculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned. 

Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions arepainful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotionsbecome a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of theseemotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variouslyinterpreted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, anexhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbingpresence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotionalenergy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to beloosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity andterror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, arespecifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiateemotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similarpleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liabilityof immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It isnot credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, canbecome pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arisesonly in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama whenthe restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wiseoccurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice orreconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. But here we come upondarker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightlytouched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painfulspectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. Comedy, whichsimilarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remainpainless. Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any placein a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all ofwhich proceed from incongruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedybelong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculoustypes of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance, and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progressin both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unlessindeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universethan we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and thekindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both areequally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interestingto observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it waslittle thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as hereoutlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, whichthus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law inall tragic art. 

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole rangecommensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectualand emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is builtup has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, ashas been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. Butthe concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life;it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world ofsense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a newparticular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature madeperfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, orto the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been oftenand diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of newknowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, orthat of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest inseeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusioncreated for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitationis an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize theartistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. Itis that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, thedifference between its created concrete and the original out of whichthat was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, theinevitability of the plot, --it is the pure and intelligible formdisclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apartfor the contemplation of the mind, --it is the purging of the sensualeye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw throughit, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelationaccomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only areduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have beenmentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from itssupersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with orderingpower. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfectionswhich are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, andchoice. 

It will be said at once that all these concrete representationsnecessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in ameasure this is true, and would be important if the method of art weredemonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental andinductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in theirprocesses, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, thequantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, areinexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as anembodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality. Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, anddecline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been runmany times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensibleform being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in thesecond stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, atransparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more thanthe thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. Thepeculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being acaprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in itsrendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is thisattention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist drawsthe mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, theimportant fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more andmore, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. Thistendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutesdecline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from thesearch for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomenaof a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the factof decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and theincreased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail. Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history ofart this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages areclearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, andEuripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster. How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet morerepulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture, passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxedvoluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of thiscentury with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style;but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, beingindividualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading;classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind. The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to knowourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of thecommon nature of man results. Is it to know others as different fromourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormalindividuals in extraordinary environments results. This is theopposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limitsof art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tendto the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special traitor detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broadapplication, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, thecriminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realisticart, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on thatwisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of anation's effort. Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact andhomogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effortthat seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; whenthese are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, greattypes of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As thesehistoric generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up inindividual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of theGreek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus;and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaningand transitory literature of a society interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at thecentre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars;such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the racesthat present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as theHebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuriesof the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on themore or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on theirbroad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance. The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a questionwhich to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art hasbeen resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, byits nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a singlebeing; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal, the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usuallythe eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensationthat are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, thevanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense. 

The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this widerange is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist andpresented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. Hisnature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or oferror, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences ofperceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import thispersonal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to theoriginality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. Inrendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practicallyadmitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take theaccount of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, thoughthey thereby only substitute their own error for that of the artist. This personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus ofhuman nature. 

The differences in personality go far deeper than this common liabilityof humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. Theisolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in hisprivate experience, and results from his original faculties and thespecial conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attendingto some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has madein the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it havebeen determined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; aman's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life, characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others, because he must draw on that store for his materials. Thus a man'scharacter, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting inconjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controllingforce in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presentsthe universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in hisapprehension of it and its meaning. 

Genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the mandiffers from the average in ways that find significant expression. Thisdifference may proceed along two lines. It may be aberration from normalhuman nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to athousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversionapproaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathologicaland may be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development ofnormal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form ofinward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things, in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombinationand expression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the humanspirit are made. The basis of it is still, human faculty dealing withthe universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common tomankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to menat large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, canadvance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a wordguide the race. The isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound, and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. Thesolvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of acommon world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experienceintelligible to all, even if unshared by them. The humanity of geniusconstitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though itlives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; itexpects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there itssignal and sounds there its call. Its escape from personality lies inits identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shallfinally be merged and be at one. The limitations of genius areconsequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in theordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, andexpression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields withinthem; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, butwhat we shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is mostfixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in thedoctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously setforth and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becoming a defective orfalse method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, andgains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as awhole. 

The element of self which thus enters into every artistic work hasdifferent degrees of importance. In objective art, it is clear that itenters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind ofright reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and ifthe work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remainsobjective in contents, as in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeplyas to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt orcapable of being felt universally, --the profound moods of the meditativespirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in lessserious works. In proportion as society develops, whether in historicstates singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression ofself for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes morepersonal or purely subjective. If the poet's private story be one ofaction, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectivelyrendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, ifthe felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treatedas typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet isvariously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance, has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a highnormal type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, in fact, only adetail of the general proposition that in art history has no value ofits own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his natureand career, like that of any character or event in history, have noartistic value beyond their universal significance. In suchself-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depravednature, such as Villon; but such a type takes its place with othercriminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in anothersphere. 

This element of self finds its intense expression in lyricallove-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of itselementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts ofthe emotional field. In seeking concrete material for lyrical use thepoet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world ofinanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. It is a marvellousvictory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven andthe flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as itseems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph andsymphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not thevision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is thecolour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inwardmood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emptied of hercontents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The poet'smethod is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beautywithout to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by thatbeauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects beforehim through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucentwith his own spirit. 

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magicalpower. The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first broughtinto a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the windstill being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing allthis limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneousapproaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the objectof his invocation, --

 "Be thou me, impetuous one!"

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst ofpersonality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there isonly a spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, and Keats in someodes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as ofsome cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's powerof conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotionallife; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seemslent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in whichhe is born to that divine union to which he is destined. The evolutionof this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies inpersonality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the externalworld which is its imagery, --its body lifted from the dust, woven oflight and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And here, too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be oneto which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is itonly nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress ofimagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty, but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of, though this is rare in merely lyrical expression. 

The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thusbuilt up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfectedimitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities ofrelation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the senseof beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire ofthe mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence isborn the will to conform one's self to this order. If, then, this orderbe conceived as known in its principles and in operation in livingsouls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in anentire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity, --if itbe conceived, that is, as the model of a world, --that would be to knowit as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate theworld of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. Thatis the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as adeveloping world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God, " asPoe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however fragmentary, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing itselfin beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature, --operative uponthe will to live. It is preeminently a vision of beauty. It is true thatthis beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by themind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for itis, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen inhimself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. Here is that wovenrobe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizonsof the eye and hand. Yet as idealism was found on its mental sideharmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional sideharmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfectingtemperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in withthe natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this sense, too, existed inlife before it passed into literature. The youth idealizes the maiden heloves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old manidealizes his youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when hefirst saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then tolearn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in thisearly knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not thatsuch enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noblefeelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on?In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens andsupples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra. Who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads, remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them?Such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almostimmortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strikeupon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of themare the real time in which we live. It was said of old that great menwere creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race;these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age afterage. Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize thegreat of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we mostwould be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love, --so naturalis it to believe in the perfection of those we love, --and even if thetime for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our ownfrailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since lovecontinues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is thetenderer because it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts or ouremotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literaturewhich discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection andwith greater beauty? There we find the purest types to raise and sustainus; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, thatpassion, which most supports the will in its effort. There historyitself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past ofhuman emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincingpower. Nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealismfalls in, but with divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as ourFather in heaven is perfect? And what is that image of the Christ, whatis that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of thecreative reason, --not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunatein gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint andsinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of themillions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that greattradition, --the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that menwere never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able tobreathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we not boldlyaffirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which wefail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that inthe ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the onlyreality, the truth which outlasts us all? But this may seem a subtleevasion rather than a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism isone of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, andassumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality itowns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet inits fiery mist. I believe that ideal character in its perfection ispotentially in every man who is born into the world. We forecast thefuture in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves?Would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in greatenterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to begained? The ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual ormoment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estatebecause he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. It is the law ofour being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examplesand patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There is nofalsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth insteadof a possession of it. Will you limit us to one moment of time andplace? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographicalterm? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, willyou point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actualAmerica? Will he not rather say that his America is a great past, afuture whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any falsehood in thisideal country that men have ever held precious? Did Pericles lie in hisgreat oration, and Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervidItalian lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of men, ofthe soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and besideeach of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an idealself, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truthis so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizingtemperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit theart of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more doesthe fool in all his motley the art of literature. 

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver thathowever stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be rememberedthat in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to idealorder, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy ofwhat ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youthnever to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief tomake a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequentsuffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be frank: Iown that I can perceive in Nature no moral order, that in her worldthere is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general herorder often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational andpitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social, and its invasion in the individual, life of man. But, again, were we sosituated that there should be no external divine order apparent to ourminds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there would still remain in us that order whose workings are knownwithin our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and mercifulin order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the wholeimperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, irrespective of what future attends us in the world. Ideal order as themind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured inits own forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat inreality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to astoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet benobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no suchdifference between the world as it is and the world as ideal artpresents it. 

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is natureregenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be;an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as theultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpseshave already appeared in the course of this argument, though in thebackground. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to generalstatement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealizationof evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in morepartial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere alsothere is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as theelement in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphereof the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil ashis portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the goodtends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in theworld of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; theextremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcendlife, but are developed out of it. The difference between these twopoles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that ofthe other an order of death. Between these two is the special provinceof the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not theultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking intoaccount the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be inits evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hencetragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the otherhand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of theintermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man'swill. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in whichall shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, byalliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in itsvoluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice. We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which isdeath. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worldsknown to us in tendency if not in conclusion, --the world of salvation onthe one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order ofdeath prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to showus the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of thereality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperityfollows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldlymeasure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; howwe, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitterfates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, orthose ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostileenvironment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring theactual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by settingthem in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant notonly against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of ourmortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most underminingand intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which isour theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in itsintelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and theuniverse, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the waysmost profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realizethe good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men. Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of goodand evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, ofbeauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of thingsthat are, in selected and typical examples. 

It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation inpersonality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular orgeneral, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all forwhich no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been madeintelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use ofthat term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, asmatter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mysterytherefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of theunknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this newmaterial, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sensecharacterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The newinformation which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research intothe past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us bothprimitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progressworking out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by theattention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to thelower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, whichhas been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Hererealism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which mayhereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, foridealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incomingof facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, forwhich we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, thereremains forever that residuum of which I spoke, which has resisted theintelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling, the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmeritedsuffering, that impotent pain, --the human debris of the socialprocess, --which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to theheart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. Inthis region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, isplain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, theunredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminaleducation, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well ascontrolling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answerhas ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merelythat particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves arediscernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not beenbrought into any relation with what I have named the divine order. Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust ofpast time, --eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christianbutcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive. 

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into aheavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place forrealism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is byinference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us;yet what problems are we aware of? Must, --to take the special problem ofart, --must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp andwoof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all ourcapabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. MustGod be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of ourhumanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortalpleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritualbliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These arerather philosophical problems. But in art, as at the realistic end ofthe scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at theidealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after humanmodels, and feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. Themysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, itis a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of theintelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by thecreative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along thenarrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do knowthat for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of lifeis within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut withinthese limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of ourdesires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that thedivine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, thatthe soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or fromGod, --that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springingfrom our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcendsknowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature assertsthis faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as thecentre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject torational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to thewill to live. 

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith asnigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledgeand saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as anartistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolvinglike God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangementinto the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our briefmodel of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way oflimiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may seewithin our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is artafter all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frailpowers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see theevil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so thatthe world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercisedin Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation fromthe ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman'spicture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its varioushistory, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, theirmutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion oflong-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintendingdesign, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers ortruths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, nottoward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, hisfar-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over hisfuturity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the successof evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity ofsin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopelessirreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactlydescribed in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in theworld, '--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon themind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond humansolution. " In the face of such a world, even when partially madeintelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism whichwould have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I canfind no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicableeffort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it isnot indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order oflife or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph ofthat order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing ofChrist's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a functionof the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; forlife would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. Somuch of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfectdenies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as idealart presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militantin its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that ofthe process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in theworld. 

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race'sforeknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methodsof their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men inrespect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, ascontradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the thingsof the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of thethings of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as thereal world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that whichought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun humanrealization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of thenever-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet risingwave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in thecosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and greatempires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritualuplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth. 

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that theimpossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order isproved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced byanother, there is no permanence in them. It is true that the concreteworld, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarilyimports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, athing that passes away. It is also true that the world of knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, andnecessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more, and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us considerthe form and the contents separately. The element of mortality in theform is included in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the worldas he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature thechanging phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, thebattle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of thegods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what isbelieved of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. Thefact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense ofactuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes earlyliteratures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous hasin them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, growsremote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inwardmeaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; itbecomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated inlyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universalenters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad humanscale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of artwhich hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as inDaphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as inBion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as inmany an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality andshows a purely spiritual body. 

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. Itis illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In thebeginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then warfor a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess andjustifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, whichrefines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the willof courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battlewithin the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight arethe terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the mostsavage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort. Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merelyobjective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power inillimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and itstender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last thewords of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest ofmoral truths, --that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out ofwhose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, itsair and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies ofthe field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet Isay unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed likeone of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of thisthat man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continueto use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance. The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the idealmeaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, havetheir place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibilitythrough changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language. It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases ofnature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicablebeliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language;and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to itsomnipresent character as a thing of the common lot. 

The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is apassing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a lossneed not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing awayof the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not toanother, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility forthat of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. Thecontents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods ofour earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. Aparallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of theevolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take akindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now thehistory of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, sothese ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as hasbeen attained. They have more than a descriptive and historicalsignificance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeableelement in the universe and in man's nature is in the main theirsubject-matter. It is not merely that the child repeats in hiseducation, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hencemust still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; northat in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in thecharacteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of whatis admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points inwhich they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity andtemperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, andChristian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive. 

There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement withinit; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, thegrowth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into eachreincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which isimmortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what iscardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in awork of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; sogreat is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the powerto translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms ofdifferent beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, ifthe work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect. Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer, something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasingportion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keepingto the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped thenatural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so, not so much by the personal power of their authors as by theirrepresentative character. These ideal works of the highest range, whichembody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as thesuccessive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race andstate, of world experience and social personality; they differ, racefrom race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan orChristian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they aresolved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the elementof the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which theycontain, --in man, "Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless";

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive, --racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yetgoing on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, stillpagan, still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest pointwastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vitalenergy, in a forward reach. 

The nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated fromthe epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanentelements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. Epic action has beendefined as the working out of the Divine will in society; hence itrequires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflictof a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of adouble plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. These are thecharacteristic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance, the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found muchadaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever freshdifficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. The idea ofthe Divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception ofsociety itself were all subject to change. Epics at first arehistorical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardnessof meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing that remainscommon to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower, overruled by Providence. They have two subjects of interest, one thecause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and betweenthese two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them andyet preserving their dual reality. 

The Iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society isstill loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The Aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits theenormous development of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with Carthage andwith Turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny ofRome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpoweringas to make Aeneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the othercharacters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine will was conceivedas finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plotpresented little difficulty; but in the coming of Christian thought, even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, theinterpretation became arduous. In the Jerusalem Delivered the socialconflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis inthe wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of theheavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itselfineffectual in inspiring a true belief. So in the Lusiads, while theconflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonizationin the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot franklyreverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility. 

In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historicallyconceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in Adam, is themost important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superiorbeings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, themachinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, howeverstrongly supported by the Scriptures, has little convincing power. Thetruth is that the Divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit insociety, being Providence there, and operating in secret but normal waysin the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and alsoas equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the Spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. One change, too, of vastimportance was announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is withinyou. " This transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre ofspiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the socialsignificance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of allmen's lives. The Faerie Queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways inEnglish, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by arevolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and notby the progress of one main course of events. The conflict of the higherand the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense is thereshown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in itsworldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize theheavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortalways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. Thecelestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almostan exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievementof God's will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man'smoral victory. In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of theepic. There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher andlower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of theRound Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regeneratestate. Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the HolyGrail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on themarvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into thesensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of "soulwith sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spenser's; the method ofrevolution of its phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems differ inthe point that Spenser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so faras earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in MiltonAdam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as adivine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is savedto the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order comingon, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem inmany details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroesof epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lostcause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict tobring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared exceptas the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval frombeyond the barriers of the world to come. But in showing the differentconditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties ofinterpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, itsrelaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man'suniversal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latestexample, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of timeto which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth survivingin the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how theends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by theunion of divine grace with heroic will, --the interpretation andglorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself agoafter age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the idealorder over its foes in the entire race-life of man. 

Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men inrespect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which aredescribed as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. It hasbeen attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element ofremoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classicalart has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the samecuriosity as romantic art. If I were to endeavour to oppose them Ishould say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form, it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, itdefinitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it hasrichness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests morethan it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, itinvigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and livesin the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality whichis the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on somethingelse, --the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawningpower into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. Thetwo have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancientliterature being large. But owing to the disclosure of the world to usin later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are ourbounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given toemotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by Christianity tothought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element hasbeen more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fedmoreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greatervalue and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization, and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses ofhuman experience as our observation now controls. The romantic temper isinevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, butfragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion aneternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can renderwith an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery whichis required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in thehabit of the sensitive and serious mind. Yet in classical art thedefinite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Idealism hasits finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its propheticwork. 

Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is theworld of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind. Idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of thecommonplace. Its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction isto embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experienceand personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the race. Shakspere, our great example, asColeridge wisely said, "kept in the highway of life. " That is the royalroad of genius, the path of immortality, the way ever trodden by thegreat who lead. I have ventured to speak at times of religious truth. What is the secret of Christ's undying power? Is it not that he stateduniversal truth in concrete forms of common experience so that it comeshome to all men's bosoms? Genius is supreme in proportion as it doesthat, and becomes the interpreter of every man who is born into theworld, makes him know his brotherhood with all, and the incorporation ofhis fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achievement under it, which isthe common ground of humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of suchgenius in the past; here, as I said in the beginning, the wisdom of thesoul is stored; and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so far asit has done its share in this same labour of illumination, persuasion, and command, forecasting the spirit to be, companioning the spirit thatis, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal order actual inourselves. 

What, then, since I said that it is a question how to live as well ashow to express life, --what, then, is the ideal life? It is to makeone's life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the true poet; for as art worksthrough matter and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortalconditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, and, suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and externals of thisworld and this flesh, through which it must live. In such a life, mortalin all ways, to bring down to earth the vision that floats in the soul'seyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet's gaze, incorporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, so far asour lives have power, in the world of our life, is the task set for us. To disengage reason from the confusion of things, and behold the eternalforms of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of oureyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that the willwithin us shall take on this form of reason and our manifest life wearthis form of beauty; and, more closely, to live in the primaryaffections, the noble passions, the sweet emotions, --

 "Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, Relations dear, and all the charities Of father, son, and brother, --"

and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, in joy and grief, entering sympathetically into the hearts of common men; to keep in thehighway of life, not turning aside to the eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must comewithin our vision, in their place only by the edges of true life; and, if, being men, we are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the restorationof broken order, learning also in such bitterness better to understandthe dark conflict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of theheavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, the pathos that looksdown even from blue skies that have kept watch o'er man'smortality, --so, even through failure, to draw nearer to our race; this, as I conceive it, is to lead the ideal life. It is a message blended ofmany voices of the poets whom Shelley called, whatever might be theircalamity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it is the battle-cry of that one great ideawhose slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of our longcivilization, seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and inChristianity the heavenly, hope of man, --the idea of the community ofthe soul, the sameness of it in all men. To lead this life is to be onewith man through love, one with the universe through knowledge, one withGod through the will; that is its goal, toward that we strive, in thatwe believe. 

And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; idealizeyour friend, for it is better to love and be deceived than not to loveat all; idealize your masters, and take Shelley and Sidney to yourbosom, so shall they serve you more nobly and you love them more sweetlythan if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours indeed;idealize your country, remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke andCato in his death-darkness knew not the greater Rome, the proclaimer ofthe unity of our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of ourchurch, and died not knowing, --but do you believe in the purpose of God, so shall you best serve the times to be; and in your own life, fear notto act as your ideal shall command, in the constant presence of thatother self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall you blend withhim at the end. Fear not either to believe that the soul is as eternalas the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall forever pursue thatdivine beauty which has here so touched and inflamed you, --for this isthe faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in its records. And have recourse always to the fountains of this life in literature, which are the wells of truth. How to live is the one matter; the wisestman in his ripe age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now and seekwisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, rejoicing in it;so in this world shall you live in the foregleam of the world to come. 

DEMOCRACY

Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reasonthat it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hopedfor and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be thelabour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuittoward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurelycomprehended, --world-ideas as we call them, --which they have embodied inaccomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of theidea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious ofgreatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided;that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifyinglimitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied. These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, arethe substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and allelse is but consequence. 

It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle forexistence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and restedon a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as betweenraces. In most parts of the world the first true governments weretyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, itwas confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery withoutrepugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northerntribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have allegedthat religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from therelation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it;some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ ofboth in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of manreaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature ofthe savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, boresome outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition israther one of private independence than of the grounded social rightthat democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historicalexistence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for thefirst time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely itsformative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing ismore incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, tohandle it as often and in as many phases as possible with livelycuriosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that soelementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamentalideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar. 

Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmentaltheory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying principles. There is always an ideality of thehuman spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is themain thing. The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life whichconstitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of humanconviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom andenergy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government isno more than the mode of administration under which it achieves itsresults both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. Allsociety is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations ofpower and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in sofar, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies andstrengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with thegeneral life of men, --that universal and typical life which they have incommon and which moulds them with similar characteristics. It is by thisfusion of the individual with the mass, this identification of himselfwith mankind in a joint activity, this reenforcement of himself by whatis himself in others, that a man becomes a social being. The process isthe same, whether in clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, politicalparties, or the all-embracing body of the State. It is by making himselfone with human nature in America, its faith, its methods, and thecontrolling purposes in our life among nations, and not by birthmerely, that a man becomes an American. 

The life of society, however, includes various affairs, and man dealswith them by different means; thus property is a mode of dealing withthings. Democracy is a mode of dealing with souls. Men commonly speak asif the soul were something they expect to possess in another world; menare souls, and this is a fundamental conception of democracy. Thisspiritual element is the substance of democracy, in the large sense; andthe special governmental theory which it has developed and organized, and in which its ideas are partially included, is, like other suchsystems, a mode of administration under which it seeks to realize itsideal of what life ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and onthe largest scale. What characterizes that ideal is that it takes thesoul into account in a way hitherto unknown; not that other governmentshave not had regard to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spiritualitythat gives the law and rules the issue. Hence, a great preparation wasneeded before democracy could come into effective control of society. Christianity mainly afforded this, in respect to the ideas of equalityand fraternity, which were clarified and illustrated in the life of theChurch for ages, before they entered practically into politics and thegeneral secular arrangements of state organization; the nations ofprogress, of which freedom is a condition, developed more definitely theidea of liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts of men. Democracybelongs to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advancednations, because such ideas could come into action only after the crudematerial necessities of human progress--illustrated in the warfare ofnations, in military organizations for the extension of a common ruleand culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order, justice, and the general ideas of civilization--had relaxed, and a freecourse, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of manin both private and public action. A conception of the soul and itsdestiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; thisis why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and thereforethe highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritualelement in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspectedand incalculable force. 

Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle termthat is cardinal, and the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of theequality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothedentire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, andprovocative more of laughter than of argument. What, then, is thisequality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men amongthemselves? It is our common human nature, that identity of the soul inall men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ's deathfor all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equalvalue in the eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to therites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infiniteimmortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the veryfountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that whichlevelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of ourLord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birthitself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men's souls seem aplay of fancy. There are men of almost divine intelligence, men ofalmost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and theyare such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity, circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality andwholesomeness, in the body which is her work. Such differences do exist, and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulatesinequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin shrieks against ourcreed. " But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature, though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soulhas erected in man's own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has naturecontributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity? Man's life toher is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physicalconditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itselfis not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to manabove the brute. Her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she isnot our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are nowcoming to control her material, powers and their operation. 

This equality which democracy affirms--the identity of the soul, thesameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment--drawsafter it as a consequence the soul's right to opportunity forself-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shallbe its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both byinherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the determination of democracy is that, so faras may be, it will secure equality of opportunity to every soul bornwithin its dominion, in the expectation that much in human conditionswhich has hitherto fed and heightened inequality, in both heredity andcircumstance, may be lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth issubject to great control. This is the meaning of the first axiom ofdemocracy, that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and itsearly cries--"an open career, " and "the tools to him who can use them. "In this effort society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for inhuman history the accumulation of the selfish advantage of inequalityhas told with as much effect as ever it did in the original struggle ofreptile and beast; and in our present complex and extended civilizationa slight gain over the mass entails a telling mortgage of the future tohim who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency is of such highvalue in such a society that it must needs be favoured to the utmost; onthe other hand a complex civilization encourages a vast variety oftalent, and finds a special place for that individuation of capacitywhich goes along with social evolution. The end, too, which democracyseeks is not a sameness of specific results, but rather an equivalence;and its duty is satisfied if the child of its rule finds suchdevelopment as was possible to him, has a free course, and cannot chargehis deficiency to social interference and the restriction of establishedlaw. 

The great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the masses is notmerely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishestheir title to such good in human life as they can obtain, on thebroadest scale and in the fullest measure. What other claim, so rationaland noble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they findestablished in the world they are born into? The results of pastcivilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, whoreceive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greaterindividual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, offortunate careers. It does not matter that the things which belong tolife as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannotbe monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they findpreoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able toreach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they assertas against this sequestering of social results and material andintellectual opportunity, except to say, "we, too, are men, " and withthe word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are notirretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, bettersupplied with the means of subsistence and the accumulated hoard of thepast, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? It is nota fanciful idea. It is founded in the unity of human nature, which is ascertain as any philosophic truth, and has been proclaimed by everymaster-spirit of our race time out of mind. It is supported by theuniversal faith, in which we are bred, that we are children of a commonFather, and saved by one Redeemer and destined to one immortality, andcannot be balked of the fulness of life which was our gift under divineprovidence. I emphasize the religious basis, because I believe it is therock of the foundation in respect to this principle, which cannot besuccessfully impeached by any one who accepts Christian truth; while inthe lower sphere, on worldly grounds alone, it is plain that the immenseadvantage of the doctrine of equality to the masses of men, justifiesthe advancement of it as an assumption which they call on the issue intime to approve. 

It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon itsprophetic power. Within the limits of nature and mortal life the hopeof any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as myjudgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to methat the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differencesinessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it inthought, will, or feeling is in question. I do not see, if I maycontinue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, induty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of thesame community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations oflife, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all thatthe belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among thecommon people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, whichremains life as all know it--a thing of affection, of resolve, ofservice, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. Is it notreasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of lifewithin our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortifiedas it is by any conception of heaven's justice to its creatures? and toassume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow itsprophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with theservice of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At allevents, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than wouldotherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found tobe true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races intheir degree. 

The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality of opportunity forself-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basisof conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main objectof the State; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured. It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equalityin importance. Every State, every social organization whatever, impliesa principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolutetype of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as inconstitutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority arenecessary in order that the will of the State may be realized. Theproblem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which ismost consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts withthe greatest furtherance and the least interference in theaccomplishment of the chief end in view. It composes authority, therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consentof the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their activedecree. The social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not ofmen; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with noportion of his freedom of will; the will of the State is still his ownwill, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up onesum, --the authority of the nation. This is social self-government, --notthe anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, butgovernment through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase, organically combined with others in the single power of controlbelonging to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the secondarystage, for the continuous action of the State, by representation, technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, byuniversal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that inconstituting this authority, which is social as opposed to personalfreedom, --personal freedom existing in its social form, --it includesevery unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. Democracy thusestablishes the will of society in its most universal form, lyingbetween the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy;it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it withthe entire original force of the community. 

This universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limitedforms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the factthat nothing enters into it except man as such. The rival powers whichseek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a puredemocracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has itsclaim as the custodian of education and property and the advantagesflowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulatedcapital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its mostintense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and wouldappropriate to themselves in the structure of government arepresentation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. Ifit be still allowed that all men should have a share in aself-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, inaddition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants ofsuch men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these three things, education, property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities inhuman conditions which democracy would minimize. They embody past customand present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead thatthey found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their owndomination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; butthey must show farther some reason in present conditions underdemocracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequalityshould be clothed with governing power. 

Universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argumentagainst it is twofold. It is said that, though much in the theory ofdemocracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at largelack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also thatthey control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. Theoperation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiringknowledge and skill, and it has no limits. In state affairs educationshould have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popularcontrol; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnifythe representatives of education and property to such a degree that theywill retain deciding power. But is this so? or if there be some truth inthe premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme andreconciled with it? And, to begin with, is education, in the specialsense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffragemakes? I speak, of course, of literary education. It may well be thecase that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed andsound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good ofsociety is for all in common, and being, from the political point ofview, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business andbosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort ordeprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and thosewide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence andthe facts. Politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally, a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are notits sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affecthuman life is their political significance. On the broad scale, who is abetter judge of their own material condition and the modifications of itfrom time to time, of what they receive and what they need frompolitical agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by whatis done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses?Experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universallydiffused. Education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It isnot synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men, and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it. Intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man appliesit, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man;for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters whichtouch his own interests, widely shared. The school of life embodies acompulsory education that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in themain a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men, the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competentto deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, thoughhighly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure ofthings, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, ata less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mildforms. Besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that arerequired to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. Thesphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is reallylimited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfishstruggle of material interests in a vast and diversified State. 

Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to thepeople in their state of life, and also a test of any general policyonce put into operation. The capacity of the people to judge the eventin the long run must be allowed. But does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, thatright choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedyitself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? Iam not well assured that it is not so. The masses have been long inexistence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breedthat through

 "old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain. "

The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than inothers the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these arevital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universalconditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, intelligence works inprecisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as inother parts of life. They listen to those they trust who, byneighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actualshare in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund ofinformation, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion andtheir instruments in the policy they adopt. These leaders may be calleddemagogues. They may be thought to employ only resources of trickeryupon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallowone, and not justified by facts. It is right in the masses to make menlike themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred intheir own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men, however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments ofthe social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in theircruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. Such a man is a true chiefof a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trustand managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his ownsuperior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brainsand wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and powerhimself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, havetheir governmental life. No doubt he has great qualities of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to becomea chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of publicsupport, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, whichstore themselves in him. Such the leaders of the people have alwaysbeen. 

If this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of powerrises the more limited elements of social influence enter into theresult with more determining force--be apparently crude in its earlystages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process ofsocial expansion in other parts of life? Wherever masses of men areentering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur?in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as itis termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the Methodistmovement, in the Presbyterian movement, in the Protestant movement, world-wide? Was English Puritanism free from the same sort ofcharacteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democraticpolitics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, are those thatbelong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving massesof men upward into more noble ranges. Men of the people lead, becausethe people are the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, howeverwell-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply inthe popular soil. Literary education, it must never be forgotten, is notspecially a preparation for political good judgment. It is predominantlyconcerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate politicalconsequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technicalprocesses and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity oflife not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political. Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of politicalsystem, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly orpeculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics, unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing fromtheir pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideasin a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in realityas much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing withthese vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty ofits own. 

It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as awhole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been onthe side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionaryera the class was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinatingelement in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius whichforesees the times to come and develops principles by which they come;it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property andancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them isdeeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative ofthe past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often anote of despair. I do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutionshave come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, howeverthey may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and somewelcome in aristocrats. The power of intellectual education as anelement in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which isless than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, andarrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection withlove or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, orselfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with thefield of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in thepopular life. Intelligence, in the form of high education, can make noauthoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, asa rule, its successful examples in character. The suffrage, except as bynatural modes it embodies the people's practical and generalintelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives ofthemselves whom it elects to serve the State, need not look to higheducation as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leadingin matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expertknowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but inso far as it is separable from the business of the State, and stands byitself in a class not servants of the State and mainly critical andtraditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because ofany superiority of judgment it may allege. In fact, education hasentered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power, in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, andthe enfranchisement of education, if I may use the term, is rather ademocratic than an aristocratic trait. Education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under theolder systems. But in a democracy it remains true, that so far aseducation deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, andenter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own. There, least of all, does it need privilege. Education is one inequalitywhich democracy seems already dissolving. 

What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, assuch, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the menthey trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. If thesuffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness andignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies not in aguardianship of the people by the educated class, but in populareducation itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that generalinformation which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that isrequired for the comprehension of the great questions decided bysuffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisionsinto effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred ofsuch schools and such means for the spread of political information ashave grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many otherthan political ways. No force has been so great, except the discussionof religious dogma and practice under the Reformation in northernnations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. Thesuffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about asubstitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as thenormal mode of dealing with important differences of view in Stateaffairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and thepreservative of that great element of liberty, and progress underliberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also acontinuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as theyarise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great anaccumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itselfthe right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable ofreceiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought, free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in theState, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and thatof the State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is itto be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questionswhich come before the suffrage for settlement are, in view of the wholecomplex and historic body of the State, comparatively few; for societyand its institutions, as the fathers handed them down, are accepted atbirth and by custom and with real veneration, as our birthright, --thebirthright of a race, a nation, and a hearth. The suffrage does notundertake to rebuild from the foundations; the people are slow to removeold landmarks; but it does mean to modify and strengthen thisinheritance of past ages for the better accomplishment of the ends forwhich society exists, and the better distribution among men of the goodswhich it secures. 

Fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, enforces the idea ofequality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea ofliberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtainingprivate ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to itsexercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and toprovide others with the means of sharing in it. This good isinexhaustible and makes up welfare in the State, the common weal. It isin the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, andthose expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues, generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life. In defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of materialinterests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of ahigher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, whichhave in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government hasin charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never farfrom want, and therefore government must concern itself directly andcontinuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higherlife has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimatelyare within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon allthose causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty, justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and inour consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, wasthe war for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind underdemocracy. In such crises, which seldom arise, material good issubordinated for the time being, and life and property, our greatpermanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which istheir great charter of value, as we conceive our country. 

Yet even here material interests are not far distant. Such issues arecommonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, orare alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are aconstituent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It iscommonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity isrequired in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, isan affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plainauthorization reform is regarded as an invasion of personal liberty ofthought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place ofprogressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. Inproportion as the material interests are less clearly affectedinjuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, andloses political vigour. Religious issues constitute the extreme ofpolitical action without regard to material interests, wars ofconversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with lessdeveloped races. For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere offraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social institutionsand habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in publiccharities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support. On occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the wholecommunity in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championedunder democracy is the spiritual right of man. 

But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in thatprinciple of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in thatsubstitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, whichdemocracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with theauthority of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, in itsmoral form, outside of politics, --which is so largely resorted to in acommunity that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man anddecreed by him out of his own soul, --need not be enlarged upon here; butin its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and willnecessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, sincelaw thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itselfno longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which itis adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny, recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as thathas historically been. But outside of this refinement of thought in theanalysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracyis that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before itcan impose itself as the will of the State on its citizens, marks aregard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highestconsequence in State affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habitupon the rest of life. 

That portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, andremains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the natureof society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are bestpreserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all inturn. Those rights are more respected under democracy than in any otherform of government. The important question here, however, is not theconduct of the State toward an opposition in general, which is at onetime composed of one element and at another time of a different element, and is a shifting, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its attitudetoward the more permanent and inveterate minority existing in classinterests, which are exposed to popular attack. The capital instance isproperty, especially in the form of wealth; and here belongs thatobjection to the suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the effectthat, since the social will has no limits, to constitute it by suffrageis to give the people control of what is not their own. Property, reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the great source ofinequality in the State and the continuer of it, and gives riseperpetually to political and social questions, attended with violentpassions; but it is an institution common to civilization, it is veryold, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies ofindividual life, the means of supplying society on a vast scale withproduction, distribution, and communication, and the process of takingpossession of the earth for man's use. Its social service isincalculable. At times, however, when accumulated so as to congestsociety, property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as inEngland under Henry VIII, in France at the Revolution, and in Italy inrecent times. The principle of paramount right over it in society hasbeen established in men's minds, and is modified only by thesocial conviction that this right is one to be exercised with thehighest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a just necessity. Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to destroy and confiscate in itsextreme exercise, normally takes nothing from property that is not due. It is not a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt;for property and its owners are the great gainers by society, underwhose bond alone wealth finds security, enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them untold private advantages. Property is deeplyindebted to society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of itsmaterial cannot be said to be earned, but was given either from thegreat stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, conferring privilege, or from the overflowing increments of social progress. If it isnaturally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if it has to besubjected to control, if its duties have to be thrust upon itoftentimes, it has such powers of resistance that there need be littlefear lest it should suffer injustice. Like education, it has greatreserves of influence, and is assured of enormous weight in the life ofthe community. Other vested interests stand in a similar relation to theState. These minorities, which are important and lasting elements insociety, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealingadversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternitywhich seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one. 

Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficientlyindicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund publiceducation as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the greatelement of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into allparts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme andthe organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in amutual understanding and regard. It has established, too, protection inthe law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against therich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for theirown benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservationof the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of allchildren, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with itssalutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, establishedtoleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice ingeneral; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faithin the community as a body in all its parts and interests intendingdemocratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit ofreserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty, --a respect thatawaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about, --which asa constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized. 

The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its endand summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacredword of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its socialinstrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind inthe mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms; itsknowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature ofthe event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the maina method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement forthe peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and toa considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shallbe done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it maybe, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution ofdifficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches. Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and itsacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying onerule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, onthe broad scale. Those matters which make individual justiceimpossible, --especially the element of personal responsibility inwrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility tomotives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all suchconsiderations, --law ignores in the main question, however it may admitthem in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, ascircumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part ofresponsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters littleinto the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack ofthis rude world. " Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are forthe protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropicelement in the State may use the period of imprisonment with a view toreformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of thevengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protectionsought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of itsenemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justicetoward its victims in the sphere of their own lives. It is a terribleand debasing record, up to this century at least, and uniformlycorrupted those who were its own instruments. It was the application offorce in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon whom it wasexercised, placing them outside the pale of manhood as a preliminary toits work. The lesson that the criminal remains a man, was one taught tothe law, not learned from it. On the civil side, likewise, similarreservations must be made, both as regards its formulation andoperation. The law as an instrument of justice is a rough way of dealingwith the problems of the individual in society, but it is effective forsocial ends; and, in its total body and practical results, it is apriceless monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and mercy, andthough it lags behind opinion, as it must, and postpones to a new agethe moral and prudential convictions of the present, it is in itstreasury that these at last are stored. 

If such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice doesthe course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under thelaw's inquisition so imperfectly! How continuous and inevitable, howterrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive agesby the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, inwhich the noble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and bythe impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, inconnection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of thevillain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victimsand all that is theirs. What is here represented as the general lot ofmankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives andfortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice alwayspresent. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught ofvengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. Themurdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall onesay of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great cursethat lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life underdepraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like theprimeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heardthe name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and itsoperation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their ownconduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injusticecontinually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they cangive by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realmof moral opinion. 

But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of thelaw over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, thereremains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may beadvanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation ofthe French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similargreat measures of class legislation, if you will. I confess I am one ofthose who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime andpauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in thecommunity by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in thestructure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fettersof the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early inits manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progressis made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men'spassions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomesrevolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to societyas in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing ofjustice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methodsof change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habitof philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laidto the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can butalleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills;nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more thanmollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social justice asksneither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutionsand laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature ispossible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, andin their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall beequal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporalconditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort ingovernmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no widesurvey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished isa beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, suchas the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? Itis not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman's dream. 

Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have beenworking now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered andon a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broaderapplication than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity inthose parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nationhas grown great in their charge. What, in brief, are the results, soclear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, theconfiguration of a national life? The diffusion of material comfortamong masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantryforever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life tothe mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, butthrough the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the development ofhuman capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under thestimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging andconcentrating the available talent of the State to a compass and with anefficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the materialsubjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man's life;the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect forothers grounded in self-respect, constituting a national characteristicnow first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child ofour soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the commonways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of aconservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has itsseat in the very vitals of the State and there maintains as its bloodand bone the principles which the fathers handed down in institutionscontaining our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as aliving present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our bodypolitic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and withan assimilating power that proves the universal value of democracy as amode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reasonas the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and havethe judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to useforce; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows nobounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excusesno man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standardof character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warmsympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country asinexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a willto serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we haveachieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. Is it not agreat work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belongto all our people. In the course of these results, the imperfection ofhuman nature and its institutions has been present; but a justcomparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems, and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection insociety has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steadyprogress has been made in methods, measures, and men. No great issue, ina whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public lifehas been starred with illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our Presidents in particularhave been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such menas humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud nation, and justly; and, looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-foldin the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly ownGod's bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits ofdemocracy in the new ages of a humaner world. 

It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said ofthe ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment ofthat life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it theindividual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, andmankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nighperfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future noblyconceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best thatis, from age to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, andhere manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears theform Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Throughdemocracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other systemof government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of menmay blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies ofhis own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, aselsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who standapart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal indestiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, howeverobstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from theways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblestcabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul inthis cause. 

THE RIDE

Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child's element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid andpalpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he livesin horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looksintellectually for things definite and clear. Education in generalthrough its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressingalmost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in earlyyears at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind's eye saw allthat was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eyebeheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery inman's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mindbe open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage'sknowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the worldas all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky orthe unlighted spirit, I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitatedthis conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt anddeeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery hadpassed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my firstItalian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of astormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of awave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of aspectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a newearth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck inthis water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of theAzores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget thestrangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showersof early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists andwreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near anddistant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamedthrough them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, werethe whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I couldnot have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me. But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked uponthe magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, againI felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land. It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of thenatural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamedthat on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fledbefore me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there wasno such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that salutedme coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since thatmorning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to thespirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like thatlone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountainbarriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, ofa land men yet might tread as common ground. 

"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I thenaccepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know ofour life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and Ihave since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out inmy memory even more intensely than those I have made bold tomention, --one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, asthat out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and madethese things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sisterelement of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wanderingin various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steelbranch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginablereason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There ayounger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with lifebore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heartfail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, andhardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcomeof his hands and look once more into his face before time should partus. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy madereal for one instant of golden time. 

But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlitgallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of ourwestern border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, whohad never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as thebuyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. Itwas a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together andstartled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit saton them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broadsombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength anddexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and ourspoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least thatevery moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They'rewild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due northto the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American landthat bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles thatstretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood andbrain, --brothers and friends. 

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book ofmemory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowingAugust wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in mynostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now thefarmer was thinly settling, --the new America growing up before my eyes!and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absentfriends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college coursehad gone by, --talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life, --the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recurto some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as theywere then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, Isee them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and himbeside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast. 

We mounted the five-mile ridge, --and, "Poor Robin, " he said, "what ofhim?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard, " I laughed, "in thesoft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before hetells the tale. " "I loved his 'awakening, '" he replied, "and I haveoften thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Whocan tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses mustcare for their own. That 'awakening, '" I went on, after a moment ofwondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "theLooking-glass, " and learning only that such was its name, "was whenafter the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books hisopiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of humanservice come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousnessof how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the handthat smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that broughtnew blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriothave died to form on childish lips, and make them native there withlife's first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring noobligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson inindebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give. This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion. That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of Aprilbreathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you canremember the very day, " I said. "It was one--" "Yes, I can remember morethan that, " he interrupted; "I know the words, or some of them; what youjust said was the old voice--tang and colour--Poor Robin's voice;" andhe began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and nowwere his. 

"By heaven, I never believed it. 'Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, andAtropos cuts, ' I said, 'and the poor illusion vanishes; the loudlaughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and thewise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and theidlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart ofMary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust. ' Duly in those years thesun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils;the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its blossomedfruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame ofautumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, andso far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doorssustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for mysoul. Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among myfellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true is that which my friendsaid to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die, --'I tell you, you cannotescape the mercy of God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted face, andonce more the human soul, that the ministers of God could not reach, shone in its tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at thetavern-window, and rebuked me. I go out, and on the broad earth the warmsun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when firstman looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know theirpathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the successionof day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order inthe blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not swerved from hiscourse, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth herstrength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in lifethat continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened tofairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were theascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of thebody, but I have been an ascetic of the soul. "

 * * * * *

"_Eccola!_" I said, "was it like that? But a heady rhetoric is notinconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we haveread together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild bloodis not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old coinfor the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so verydifferent. There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem tomisbehave both at once. " In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy thebroad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson ofcivilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while oneor the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels andprepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steadypace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much lessadventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read a page or two fromthe small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way ofpreface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked thetime when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes werethe first-fruits. 

The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to thewest as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of thevalley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairieregions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and thisslight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless linesof height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, waswhat first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in theearth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only theoutspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills andfar-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of Indiancorn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; theloneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were theelements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse ofthe blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color overthe gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown roadand soil. So, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word ofcomment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matternow, I read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part. 

"The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby's lips; theair asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the sensesawaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child'ssmile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a moreintimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is notless entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Naturedoes not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and thefountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above hiswill--our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bonesof the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that lawof grace that went forth with the creative word. Slow as men are torealize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supremevalue of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, therecomes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is madeaware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the formsand forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows, too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love andthe large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shapingitself in him, the vast tradition of the past, --its mighty sheltering ofmankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fosteringagencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in himof the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life, --filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes aman. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth shouldnot, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!

"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established adirect relation with the Creator, did he but realize it, --not in merethought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps theuniverse in being, 'Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above, '--

felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. Theextreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheisticmood, as here in Shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: forpantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of the fundamental character of these facts and theinevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought ofman, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same senseof insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religiouslife in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling thatall we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life inus, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come tothink man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarcedistinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh toSt. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligationfinds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on thetouch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believedthemselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets whofound some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men, know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike. But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and itsinstruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract agreater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatestin the greatest. 

"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitiveto beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardentin the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfoldshim in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how shouldgratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail tobecome a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hourin which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain?Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-bornwith this thankfulness, --the feeling of helplessness. Though the secretand inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt, --

 'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet, '--

though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst ofhappy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispensewith human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence inthe beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trialsof later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, andunder the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has livedlittle, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and allhe may become, the means of help--self-help even--and the law of it mustbe from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized witha thankful heart. Where else shall he look except to that experience ofexaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for thefuture, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness toaccept the partial ills of life? In life's valleys, then, as on itssummits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that onceconfided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific andparticularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of thingshe believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power withhimself. In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all lifeexhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing. Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation withGod, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aidas in the offering of thanks. The gratitude of the soul may be likenedto that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praisewith uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the eveningprayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace ofGod to shield him through the night. These two, in all times, among allraces, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart. 

"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches thereligious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in yearswithout finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying hisdesires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ'scommands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as theyrelate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; hecan escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christin respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. Heperceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption;its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolishit. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, ahumanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of dutythat he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty orof an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters;for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in thepurest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It maywell be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering causedin the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances thegeneral remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none--thoseleast who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known inthe language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moralcrisis of the soul; it is widely felt, --such is the nature and such thecircumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he thenbegins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, soruns his life to the end save for some great change. If then somerestoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from thememory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives thatwere lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and moretender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope ofstruggle, --in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just asthe man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue withChrist's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its originalstatement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, iswhat has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of theSpirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it fromwhat the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He hasbecome more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is nowhimself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he hasentered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthlyseal of Christian faith. 

"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attentionupon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, thoughrepeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature isput forth through health, and its curative power is an incident andsubordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in themain, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. Anarrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it bothin one's own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part oflife, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless goodachieved in those lines of human effort which have either never beendeflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths ofadvance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individuallives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses halfits dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if onerecognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence intopersonal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are alreadyincarnate in the spirit of great nations. 

"However this may be, I find on examination of man's common experiencethese three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relationbetween him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustfuldependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christianlife, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They aresimple elements: a faith in God's being which has not cared further todefine the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specifyeven a Resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself throughlimitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoateas they are, they remain faith, hope, love--these three. Are they notsufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? Totheological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship theymay seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one whois seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires theelementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a morehighly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, animpediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handlethe essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with muchin his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandonsnine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child, seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, anduniversal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he doesnot avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life, breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, theseer's insight. 

"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appearsinevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this besurprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, itmust be one independent of external things; one that comes to all byvirtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediatelygiven through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of thingstold of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may beessentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication tothe soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are thetradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To themass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief inother men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs theycannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personaland intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as somefar-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a presentreality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when theyspoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who isborn into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candlewas lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be aneverlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, thenonly is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty inliving truth, --living in us, --this personal religion, possible. 

"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of theinterfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? Thetheory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man'sneed of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine oftransubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man inhis loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm ofimage and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and theFathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soulby virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son'sright of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's waywith his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once acceptedas the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greatermass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. Thetheories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible ina humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of theScriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the greatdoctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man mayapproach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spirituallife here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, beingthe fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of manwhich has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many placesand ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historicalcriticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them thatman finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as theynaturally arise under the influence of life. 

"This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of thespiritual life in man as we possess. Man's nature is one; and, just asit is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derivedirection in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated bysaintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life withGod. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in theaptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritualfaculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen ofsuch intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed inreligious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, thatthey can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To thembelongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it isbecause they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they haveheard, --what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimonyto their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas à Kempis, and many a humbler name whoselife's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. Theyhelp us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common;and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading towhat we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. Itis not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselveshave known of his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of Godthere contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of thematter--God in us. This is the corner stone. "

 * * * * *

The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these mattersand saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was ahumble dwelling--almost the humblest--partly built of sod, with a barnnear by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "Post Office, "which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank milesround about" could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the poniesbeing fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife andthe small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was arude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have beenat such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger. It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitiveas the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomenessof life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with thelittle boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently anevent of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. Hehad been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as I thought it, which we hadjust left--with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of themagnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here wasthe creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man'sworld than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretchingsilent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all oflife. What a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said ourgood-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talkedfor a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, halfpersonal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always hadtogether; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mindas a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes haddescribed, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that myfriend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the seriousthings, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change withus--"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or byourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be thechild of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escapefrom the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men oflonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more ofit, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, andthe youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if theyhad not been lived a thousand years before, --listened like a child to astory, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda Ihad made, after that April morning, year by year. 

 * * * * *

"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in mena sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of humanfate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautifuland solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish frometernal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the senseof our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquitymerely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are tooimpalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipatesour faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desertinto a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and thesubstance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writingbeyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rocka monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower thatcaps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makesEngland ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bringthis obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customaryceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies Ihave felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of theland. 

"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seemingagelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far belowthought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is sohabitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less inthe conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils ofmankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like brokenanchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lostrelics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, whenthe finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find insome solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the lowmarshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands ofwhite pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sidesChristianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the formand garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknowneyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou inthis broken tomb, ' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death oftime; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims tothe low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin thateven the sea has long abandoned. 

"The Mother-Church?--is then this personal religious life only a stateof orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independentself, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in commonwhich by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Whyshould one not behave with respect to religion as he does in otherparts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognizebeyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a moreefficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childishor a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authoritywithin just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man insociety; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment ofintellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of thecommonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter heis either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largestmeasure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest theprinciple of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right ofprivate judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of theintellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men wholead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which wouldrepeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of theswaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove allquestions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a_tabula rasa_ at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedythat, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of ourfathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each goldpiece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all thatinstitutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by ourscrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become?Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to theintellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fillsheaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we canattain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phasesin which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifferenceamong them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What istruth?' ends all. 

"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strongand constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scopeby the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into suchidiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive socialschemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their originalmethod of independence. They find that to use authority is the betterpart of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft;and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority inlife. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters offact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men areconversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity inits own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they putthem to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life--inscholarship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His will, heshall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, ' is only a specialinstance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largelyarises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owingto the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and thepersistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men inopposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in commonlife, which knows far more of the world than it has in its ownlaboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is thedistinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn fromtrue proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all. 

"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, orcommerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human lifein these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, butas an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yieldalso in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in historyhave illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose agreat volume of instruction, illustration, and education of thereligious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignorethe alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we haveat our start over savage man, so in religion there are as wellestablished results of life already lived. Though the religious life bepersonal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and init we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other partsof life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, ofmany methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth;and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with therespect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, theirconvictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness asenforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as hewould have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship. 

"The question of authority in the religious life, however, is morespecific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the generalrespect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and ourdependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses, direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organizedreligion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice do, in man's communal life. There is a joint andgeneral consent in the masses of men with similar experience unitedinto the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar tothat of such masses united into a government with respect to secularthings. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas--the past ofChristendom--contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim toveneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered fromall ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces ofindividuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that nofree constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simplefaith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoaryand commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arroganceand folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught withinthe free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Churchdefinitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in adiffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the Throne orthe Parliament. 

"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personallife may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in itsown mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, andelevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things, not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence ofa private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organizedsocial life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past ofChristendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritualinsight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society, and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a humanpast, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life, with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process ofChristianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birthof the world? In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and formsof emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in thehistory of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of workand aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. Such areno longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belongingto that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that isforever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share inimperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to beaccounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, inthe whole of man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, andalso of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are herespoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis uponsuch particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in ayoung and conscientious heart? It may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of thisembodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's informationand the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. Butif much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the morein proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. Let us own, then, and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feeblygrasped the idea of Christ leavening the world, and has read little inthe records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in theChurch it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from livingtruth. 

"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason aswe make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing themhistorically with reference to their constant service to mankind andtheir particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was thecase with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Churchproclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of whichit would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan thought to God only, --then does it not usurp thefunction of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of thedivine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, removeGod to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation intime, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion andtherewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things forthe vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echoin the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve morethan is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if itsrites have any other reality than that of the heart which expressesitself in them and so gives them life and significance, then itsauthority is external wholly and has nothing in common with thatauthority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselvesembodied in an outward principle. If personality has any place in thesoul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority thatreligion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limitsthat reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowedradiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay orcleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in thenormal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experiencecannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available testof it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God'spresence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the wholematter. 

"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, undersuch reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justicein which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of thevalue of the personal soul in all men, --what to us is the office of theChurch? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though aninterpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectualscheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the mostmysterious known to thought. In its specific rites it dignifies thegreat moments of life--birth, marriage, and death--with its solemnsanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms inwhich religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially itenables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with theimpressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make thatact, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole inmanifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its leastgroups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by publicthanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its generalfeasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, byits seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it facilitatesits daily work among men. The Church is thus a mighty organizer ofthought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and ofpractical action in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting invarious divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods, which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, andwhose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their ownspeculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thoughtage after age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge ofhuman nature. Its joys and consolations are the most preciousinheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our pathways, and gobefore, following in the ways of the spirit. Its doors concentratewithin their shelter the general faith, and give it there a home. Itstable is spread for all men. I do not speak of the Church Invisible, but mean to embrace with this catholicity of statement allorganizations, howsoever divided, which own Christ as their Head. Temple, cathedral, and chapel have each their daily use to those whogather there with Christian hearts; each is a living fountain to its ownfold. The village spire, wherever it rises on American or Englishground, bespeaks an association of families who find in this bond aninward companionship and outward expression of it in a public habitcontinuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the memories ofgenerations gone, and tender with the hope of the generation to come;and this is of measureless good within such families for young and oldalike. It bespeaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, friendly, and searching, and growing more and more unconfined; it bespeaks a rockof public morality deep-set in the foundations of the state. 

"It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under the specificconditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yieldssomething of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degreehis personality; but this is the common condition of all socialcooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. Thecompromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essentialdifferences in important matters, but matters not then important in viewof what is to be gained in the main. The advantages of an organizedreligious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go tothe very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man's self and forhis efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general partyin the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends ofcitizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment arenot to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened at the font, naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in hisparents' place; and fortunate I count the youth who, without stress andtrouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. But some there are, born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer thantempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is moresensitive than the bare nerve, --the very flower of the Puritantradition, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be a youth inour days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosomof a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strongheads, and free hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone andblood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the Americanheart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with theform, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; iftruth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or lessthan he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative anduncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejecteddoctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowlyuprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him thathis native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this mostprivate part of life as to make it here something between God and himonly; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out hisfellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them, or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common inAmerican youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of theresponsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himselfworthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties, --if in any way, being ofnoble nature, he keeps by himself, --let him not think he therebywithdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself hemay not still take some portion of its great good. So far as itsauthority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religiouslife itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual, historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary atmost, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, howevermuch he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains aChristian. "

 * * * * *

There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soilhad long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the drawsbetween the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass haddeepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of theponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there wasin it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there!Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonelysplendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind, --and no life but ours shut in among thegroup of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earthseemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men losthad died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking ofChilde Roland's Tower, --

 "those two hills on the right Couched, "--

and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment oflife, an arrival, an end. 

The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on asstraight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach theLooking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back tomankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance towhich we drove, --a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made ournooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before anyanswer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figurethe very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone onthat prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a humancountenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, andhardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of theabandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, asI saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and sheshut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, asif we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in thatgreen waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have oftenthought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found someimage of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, asalienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, growsdehumanized, and dies. 

We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us incase of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, beforedarkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward, --asplendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, anddying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; andon we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the firstfarmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to ourcontrol, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. Itwas then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend achange, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day withwrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moonwas up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs ofthe creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, natureexercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth asit is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, butearth, the soil, the element, the globe. 

This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spokeafter a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk sincemorning. "I can't talk of it now, " he said; "it's gone into me in anhour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are tous. " I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, andthat trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; allthose years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost asmuch as for myself. "You knighted us, " he said, "and we fight yourcause, "--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but thelowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "Ihave no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expectedit would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and ofnature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that. " "Thereis a sonnet of Arnold's you know, " I answered, "that tells anothertale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has tosay is not cheerful. Nothing is wise, " I interjected, "that is notcheerful. "

But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changefultones, --and however serious the matter might be it was never far from atouch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine, --I told him, aswe drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder nearme, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, isapart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, forauthority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothingthat is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as ifman were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts ofphysics. "I convinced myself, " I said, "that the soul is not a term inthe life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and toit an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation forimmortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimesthought, " I continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of theinequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may becontained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched andfortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions anopportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is aneducation of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, atleast within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than onepagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power--birtheven, with all it involves of opportunity and fate--are insignificant, if the soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thoughtclears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggestsanother view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigidforms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of thelaw of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds bythe selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual lawrequires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the racemakes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways ofheaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a codeis at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, beingequal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefitof every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands ofthe secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature wasconstituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And ifthe choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faiththat the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to theleast in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willingthat in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent tothe death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization ofa Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction ofaristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the socialgoods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling ofthe flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all thewinds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and morepopulous life. Such has been the history of our civilization, and stillis, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered formankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. This isnot nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy isman's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physicalsphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature'swill. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in anelement plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an amplerether, a diviner air. '"

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving downthe dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out ona levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathingmists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turneda great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself formiles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon theirhaunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "theLooking-glass!" There it was, about a mile away before and below us, asplain as a pikestaff, --a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smoothas the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless, --for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave thename to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere inthe Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. Foran hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it wasan eerie thing--the earth-light of the moon on that side, --I saw it allthe time. 

"The difference you spoke of, " I began, with my eyes upon that spectralpool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving likeillusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it isthe old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soulespecially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change isself-determined, " I continued, making almost an effort to think, soweird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge ofitself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is nota conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned inalmost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into thestruggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power. In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, weinstinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemedalmost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in hermaterial history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him fromall else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speedwhich is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of theorbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powersof prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, mightit happen that through his control of elemental forces and hisacquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applyingprescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for thebetter accomplishment of her apparent ends, --that, though unimaginablenow, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaoticmotions, --chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling towardnature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscapepainters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without humanintention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort ofelemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an objectof knowledge, --a curious form of the beauty of truth. "

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lendingatmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature'scomment. "But, " I continued, "what I had in mind to say was concerningour dead selves. The old phrase, _life is a continual dying_, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has beengathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, thatwe can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the deadselves which once we were. " Instinctively we looked on the mysticglamour in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on after the natural pause, --I could not help it, --"'I was adifferent man, then, ' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, butoften with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. Howold is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality outof early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasmsof opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. Astime goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing withanother, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements ofardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, andaction in those books and men that had won his full confidence and whathe called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as ifthis growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkerswhose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, thepoets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand intheir places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in theend? After a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, hisearly manhood as something that will die. The poet, especially, whogives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into abook, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of aself that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with theembodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness, past romance; for all life, working itself out--desire intoachievement--dies to the man. Vital life lies always before. It is astrange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enterinto our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the selfwhich now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through suchself-destruction that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, andthe knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; butthis is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magicthat in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulnessin itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more andbetter, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithfulloves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of thepast whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open intolife. But, " I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the darkslopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence andwhither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuseits beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought oflife. "

The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a commonstream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with thelow indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley alongthat shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left roseinto immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the nightatmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stoodmassive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me andgrew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded powerof the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element ofslower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planetthrough space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoingtread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was aboutus, --unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before thetime of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretchedout my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all theblack rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled thechill air, --it was an envelopment--it would be an engulfment--horse andman we were sinking in it. Then it was--most in all my days--that I feltdense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth, " I thought, "ourunknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"--"What is it?" he said, feelingmy wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and thehand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing, " I answered, and didnot tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win meback to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, theexcitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, wedrove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them withhand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "Thetruest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others'lives. '" That was his thanks. 

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of thatfar prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our firstdays, --the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over hisThackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour afterhour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunatemoments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall themanly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not know how much hislife entered into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; and I have setdown these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, notfor the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find ithard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that someyounger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and findin them the dark leading of a hand.