superstition. Art, which is the most universal of all languages, which breaks down all conventional barriers and scorns all greedy prejudice, has been for three centuries at least the sanctuary of a few initiates. It may be argued that the purity of its utterance cannot capture the hearing of normal men. But we answer that all hearings are insensitive until they are educated, and we see in our own day hosts of new unjaded minds to whom poetry spells revelation and a clear vision of life if an informer will but tell them how to look and where to set their eyes. If we consider reason in its widest implication as the first principle in the morality of the modern world, we must demonstrate the sanity of great art, we must show that passions allied to reason can teach man to live as felicitously as, uncontrolled by reason, they can hurry him to his ruin; we must prove to him that the guiding principles which produce a great poem will, if applied to the life of man, guarantee an existence joyous, ample and free, and that, until man has accepted the laws of art as the standard of his habitual conduct, he may enjoy a foretaste of that ultimate harmony in the great poetry which is his heritage.

Beauty, in short, needs definition. It is because art, unlike philosophy, appeals to man's mind through his senses that it has shared the disregard which practical intelligences allot to every form of emotionalism. But true art is more reasonable

than logic, and more moral than religion. Its function is not merely to soothe the nerves or feed the senses or drug the conscience. It is not a luxury or a hobby or an agreeable decoration to life, but a model of life lived fully and without prejudice to others or discord amid its elements. And only those who approach art prepared to endure the same struggles which the artist himself underwent in searching the darkness for light and resolving the discords into harmony can taste the ecstasy of perfect living.

It is for the critic then to differentiate the phenomena by which Beauty expresses herself, to reveal the laws to which the poet submits, to translate into the language of the mind truths which are expressed in the language of the heart. Only thus can he hope to convince men of the reality of poetry and of its correspondence with the practical concerns of life. Only thus can he combat the tendency of provincial minds to reduce art to an eclectic craft, pursued for its own ends, to oppose it to morals, to divorce it from humanity, to exaggerate its mystery, to exploit its manner at the expense of its matter.

2

The world, we feel, has reached a transitional point, and the conflict between the acceptance of traditional faiths and their rationalisation is every

where evident. The ingenuous return to nature with which the last century began has been largely discredited. It has been found to have represented less a return to Paradise than a plausible reversion to barbarism. The equilibrium of nature was disturbed at the Renaissance by the first serious intrusion of self-consciousness upon animal instinct, and for more than two centuries and a half in Western Europe instinct and intellect have been engaged in inconclusive and increasingly embittered warfare. The problem before the modern world is to reconcile them. Certainly we have found the spontaneous laissez-faire of organic impulses, championed in the early nineteenth century, to be inapplicable to a world of human values. Such a hasty and instinctive optimism has resulted in a cruel waste and brought a vast catastrophe. Art, which is sensitive to every change in human consciousness, has not been slow to record this. Everywhere we realise, if we study the symptoms, that we have lost the spontaneity of generations who were willing and glad to observe beauty in life or nature externally, we have put by in distrust that unreasoning faith, that appreciative fervour which inspired men to express life with careless, impulsive munificence. Circumstances

have forced on us a loss of faith and a growth of selfconsciousness. The condition we believe to be temporary, but if we are ever to regain that credulous childhood out of which all art in augmented waves

C

of consciousness has flowed, we shall do it, not by an emotional reaction, but by a rational advance. We shall regain our belief in life, and so our love of it, without which no art can be born, by learning to understand and direct it, and then with a faith enriched by reason we shall know life to be an act co-extensive only with consciousness itself. The purging of instinct by reason and the enlargement of thought by feeling represent the poet's consciousness. With him the critical and creative faculties coincide, with men in general they customarily alternate. Thus it happens that at present our generation is more critical than creative.

We represent in fact but one more of those critical reactions against uncritical creation which have recurred throughout the ages. We see man in turn surrendering himself to nature with undiscriminating sympathy, only to draw back later aghast at the cruelties and errors which such an abandonment of controlling reason entails, to exaggerate then in panic the rights of his determining ego. But in turn his moral judgment becomes impoverished and false, in so far as, out of timidity and an instinct of self-preservation, he is divorced from a free experience of nature and her principles. And there follows inevitably another revolt toward nature at all costs. Yet in the critical reaction of our own day we detect more liberal traits than, for example, in the eighteenth century. We are not to-day emphasis

ing the rights of intellect to the complete exclusion of the wealth and impulse of nature. We are in fact attempting from a critical standpoint a reconciliation between human and natural values, between life and reason; we are striving towards an ideal harmonytentatively, to be sure, because we are fearful of licence, but with a more enlightened purpose than ever perhaps in the history of the world. We see this intention alive both in art and in social theoryand we can associate its inauguration with no one more fittingly than Goethe.

For Goethe was too vital to fear his passionshe indulged them, and then criticised their quality: in this how different from Rousseau, who indulged his feelings in wild timidity, and sentimentalised them in retrospect. The importance of Goethe is that his nature felt the two claims of passion and of logic, and that throughout his life we witness the conflict of these two claims, the temporary triumph now of one and now of the other, the final defeat of neither. To the survival of both we owe his instructiveness. The problem which Goethe attempted to solve, of explaining his intuitions of life to his reasoning faculty, is that which faces every critic of art and of life to-day. For if reason in its widest implication is to prove the morality of the world, that art only is likely to survive which is adequate to the reason as well as to the instinct of man. We, who see in the life and art of the last century