well as a lamp for their counters; it has on its side, very naturally, the purblind, the clever, the cunning, the prudent, the discreet, those who can only see things close, those who scrutinize a spider's web. But there must be somebody on the side of the stars! somebody to stand up for brotherhood, for mercy, for honour, for right, for freedom, and for the solemn splendour of absolute truth. With all their sublimity and serenity, flowers as they are of summer everlasting, the shining constellations have need that the world they guide should bear them witness that they shine, and some man's voice be raised in every age to reassure his brothers by such cry of testimony uttered across the night; for nothing would be so terrible as an ultimate equality of good and evil, of light and darkness, in the sight of the supreme and infinite unknown world; nothing would bring so heavy an indictment against God as the mad and senseless waste of light unprofitably lost and scattered about the hollow deep of heaven without the direction of a will. This absence of will, this want of conscience in the world, the prophet of belief refuses to accept as possible. In the last poem. of the book he rejects the conception of evil as triumphant in the end, of nature as a cheat so ghastly and so base that God ought to hide himself for shame, of a heaven which shelters from sight a divine malefactor, of some one hiding behind the starry veil of the abyss who premeditates a crime, of man as having given all, the days of his life, the tears of his eyes, the blood of his heart, only to be made the august plaything of treacherous omnipotence it would not be worth while for the winds to stir the stormy tide of our lives, for the morning to : come forth of the sea and dazzle the blinded flowers with broadcast seed of diamond, for the bird to sing, or for the world to be, if fate were but a hunter on the trail of his prey, if all man's efforts brought forth but vanity, if the darkness were his child and his mother were the dust, if he rowed on night and day, putting forth his will, pouring out his blood, discovering and creating, to no end but a frightful arrival nowhither; then might man, nothing as he is, rise up in judgment against God and take to witness the skies and stars on his behalf. But it is not so; whence morning rises, the future shall surely rise; the dawn is a plighted word of everlasting engagement; the visible firmament is as it were a divine promise to pay; and the eternal and infinite God is not bankrupt. In the strength of this faith a man may well despise all insult and all falsehood thrown up at him, all railing and mockery of his country or his creed from the unclean lips of church pamphleteers and other such creatures of the darkness and the dirt as in all lands alike are bred from the obscurer and obscener parts of literature. These are to him no more than the foul bog-water at its foot is to the oak whose boughs are the whole forest's dome; than the unlovely insects of the dust that creep beneath it are to the marble giant, august in its mutilation—to the colossal Sphinx of rose-tinged granite, grim and great, that sits with hands on knees all through the night wherein the shaken palm-trees shiver, waiting for its moment to speak to the sunrise, and unconscious if any reptile beslaver its base. The god has never known that a toad was stirring; while a worm slides over him, he keeps in silence his awful mystery of hidden sound and utterance withheld; and the swarming of centipedes without number cannot take from Memnon, suddenly struck radiant, the great and terrible voice that makes answer to the sun. Those minute and multitudinous creatures who revile and defame the great-and thereby, says Blake, "blaspheme God, for there is no other God"-have no more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence against it have power to undo its work; their wrath and their mourning are in vain; the long festival of the ravenous night is over, the world of darkness is in the throes of death; the dreadful daylight has come; the flitter-mouse is blind, the polecat strays about squealing, the glowworm has lost his glory, the fox, alas, sheds tears; the beasts that used to go out hunting in the evening at the time when little birds go to sleep are at their last gasp; the desolation of the wolves fills the woods full of howling; the persecuted spectres know not what to do; if this goes on, if this light persists in dazzling and dismaying the night-hawk and the raven, the vampire will die of hunger in the grave; the pitiless sunbeam catches and consumes the dark. It is to judge the crimes of the sunrise that these judges sit in session. Meantime, amid all the alternations of troubled hope with horror and the travail of an age in labour that has not strength to bring forth, there are present things of comfort and reassurance. "The children we have always with us;" they are no more troubled about what we do than the bird that twitters beneath the hornbeam, or the star that breaks into flower of light on the black sky 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 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. If 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 |