line; they ask God for nothing but his sun; it is enough for little Jeanne that the sky should be blue. Over his son's and their father's grave the poet sees two little figures darkened by the dim shadow and gilded by the vague light of the dead. He speaks to them sweet and sublime words of blessing and of prophecy; of the glad heavenly ignorance that is theirs now, of the sad great knowledge that must be one day theirs. With the last and loftiest notes of that high soft music in our ears, we will leave off our labour of citation and exposition. They will live to know," he says, "how man must live with his fate at the mercy of chance, in such fashion that he may find hereafter the truth of things conform to his vision of them here." "Moi-même un jour, après la mort, je connaîtrai Et je me pencherai sur vous, tout pénétré Je saurai le secret de l'exil, du linceul Et pourquoi la justice et la douceur d'un seul Semble à tous une offense. Je comprendrai pourquoi, tandis que vous chantiez, Moi qui pour tous les maux veux toutes les pitiés, Je saurai pourquoi l'ombre implacable est sur moi, Pourquoi l'hiver sans fin m'enveloppe, pourquoi Pourquoi tant de combats, de larmes, de regrets, Et pourquoi Dieu voulut que je fusse un cyprès A poem having in it any element of greatness is likely to arouse many questions with regard to the poetic art in general, and certain in that case to illustrate them with fresh lights of its own. This of Victor Hugo's at once suggests two points of frequent and fruitless debate between critics of the higher kind. The first, whether poetry and politics are irreconcilable or not; the second, whether art should prefer to deal with things immediate or with things remote. Upon both sides of either question it seems to me that even wise men have ere now been led from errors of theory to errors of decision. The wellknown formula of art for art's sake, opposed as it has ever been to the practice of the poet who was so long credited with its authorship, has like other doctrines a true side to it and an untrue. Taken as an affirmative, it is a precious and everlasting truth. No work of art has any worth or life in it that is not done on the absolute terms of art; that is not before all things and above all things a work of positive excellence as judged by the laws of the special art to whose laws it is amenable. the rules and conditions of that art be not observed, or if the work done be not great and perfect enough to rank among its triumphs, the poem, picture, statue, is a failure. irredeemable and inexcusable by any show or any proof of high purpose and noble meaning. The rule of art is not the rule of morals; in morals the action is judged by the intention, the doer is applauded, excused, or condemned, according to the motive which induced his deed; in art, the one question is not what you mean but what you do. Therefore, as I have said elsewhere, the one primary requisite of art is artistic worth; "art for art's If sake first, and then all things shall be added to her-or if not, it is a matter of quite secondary importance; but from him that has not this one indispensable quality of the artist, shall be taken away even that which he has; whatever merit of aspiration, sentiment, sincerity, he may naturally possess, admirable and serviceable as in other lines of work it might have been and yet may be, is here unprofitable and unpraiseworthy." Thus far we are at one with the preachers of "art for art;" we prefer for example Goethe to Körner and Sappho to Tyrtæus; we would give many patriots for one artist, considering that civic virtue is more easily to be had than lyric genius, and that the hoarse monotony of verse lowered to the level of a Spartan understanding, however commendable such verse may be for the doctrine delivered and the duty inculcated upon all good citizens, is of less than no value to art, while there is a value beyond price and beyond. thought in the Lesbian music which spends itself upon the record of fleshly fever and amorous malady. We admit then that the worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with its moral meaning or design; that the praise of a Cæsar as sung by Virgil, of a Stuart as sung by Dryden, is preferable to the most magnanimous invective against tyranny which love of country and of liberty could wring from a Bavius or a Settle; but on the other hand we refuse to admit that art of the highest kind may not ally itself with moral or religious passion, with the ethics or the politics of a nation or an age. It does not detract from the poetic supremacy of Eschylus and of Dante, of Milton and of Shelley, that they should have been pleased to put their art to such use; nor does it de tract from the sovereign greatness of other poets that they should have had no note of song for any such theme. In a word, the doctrine of art for art is true in the positive sense, false in the negative; sound as an affirmation, unsound as a prohibition. If it be not true that the only absolute duty of art is the duty she owes to herself, then must art be dependent on the alien conditions of subject and of aim; whereas she is dependent on herself alone, and on nothing above her or beneath; by her own law she must stand or fall, and to that alone she is responsible; by no other law can any work of art be condemned, by no other plea can it be saved. But while we refuse to any artist on any plea the license to infringe in the least article the letter of this law, to overlook or overpass it in the pursuit of any foreign purpose, we do not refuse to him the liberty of bringing within the range of it any subject that under these conditions may be so brought and included within his proper scope of work. liberty the men who take "art for art" as their motto, using the words in an exclusive sense, would refuse to concede; they see with perfect clearness and accuracy that art can never be a "handmaid" of any "lord," as the moralist, pietist, or politician would fain have her be; and therefore they will not allow that she can properly be even so much as an ally of anything else. So on the one side we have the judges who judge of art by her capacity to serve some other good end than the production of good work; these would leave us for instance King John, but would assuredly deprive us of As You Like It; the national devotion and patriotic fire of King Henry V. would suffice in their estimation to set it far above the This sceptic and inconclusive meditations of Hamlet, the pointless and aimless beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream. On the other side we have the judges who would ostracise every artist found guilty of a moral sense, of the political faith or the religious emotion of patriots and heroes; whose theory would raze the Persæ from the scroll of Æschylus, and leave us nothing of Dante but the Vita Nuova, of Milton but the Allegro and Penseroso, of Shelley but the Skylark and the Cloud. In consistency the one order of fanatics would expel from the poetic commonwealth such citizens as Coleridge and Keats, the other would disfranchise such as Burns and Byron. The simple truth is that the question at issue between them is that illustrated by the old child's parable of the gold and silver shield. Art is one, but the service of art is diverse. It is equally foolish to demand of a Goethe, a Keats, or a Coleridge, the proper and natural work of a Dante, a Milton, or a Shelley, as to invert the demand; to arraign the Divina Commedia in the name of Faust, the Sonnet on the Massacres in Piedmont in the name of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, or the Ode to Liberty in the name of Kubla Khan. I know nothing stranger in the history of criticism than the perversity even of eminent and exquisite critics in persistent condemnation of one great artist for his deficiency in the qualities of another. It is not that critics of the higher kind expect to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles; but they are too frequently surprised and indignant that they cannot find grapes on a fig-tree or figs on a vine. M. Auguste Vacquerie has remarked before me on this unreasonable expectation and consequent irritation of the critical mind, with his usual |