it is modified in each case by the national character, and by different moral, social, and political conditions. I shall then, in four lectures, take Chaucer, Milton, Pope, Tennyson and Byron as the types of poetical art in different periods of English history, in order to show how each of them preserves in his work that unity and continuity of character which is the great law of taste. My concluding lecture, summing up the results of our inquiry, will be devoted to the practical consideration of the methods which ought to be pursued in liberal education with regard to the training of taste.

II

ARISTOTLE AS A CRITIC

IF ever a man was qualified by genius and circumstances to declare the fundamental laws that govern the production of works of fine art, it was Aristotle. Aristotle was the fitting representative of a race whom Nature had endowed more richly than any people before or since with the power of embodying beautiful conceptions in ideal forms of expression. He lived at an epoch when that race had passed indeed the meridian of its greatness, but was far from having sunk into decrepitude. Born in 384 B.C., within twenty years of the death of Socrates, he died in 322 B.C. within twenty years of the battle of Charonea. During that period the arts of Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture continued to flourish, so that Aristotle was acquainted not only with the principles observed by great masters in the full maturity of art, but also with the devices to which men naturally resort when the springs of natural invention are beginning to fail. The Poetics abound in instructive comparisons between the opposite aims of Polygnotus and Zeuxis in painting, of Sophocles and Euripides in poetry:

inferences are drawn not only from the Iliad of Homer but from the Deliad of Nichochares; and the contemporary mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, the tragic novelties of Carcinus, and the metrical experiments of Chæremon, furnish matter for criticism not less interesting than the established practice of the elder poets. Philosophy was fully developed, and Aristotle was already classed among the greatest, if not allowed to be the greatest, of philosophers. He had examined in the Politics all the known varieties of civil government; in the Ethics the laws of morality; in the Physics the laws of external Nature; in the Metaphysics the first principles of existence; in the De Anima the constitution of the soul in living things. He seems to have approached the subject of Fine Art and Poetry with peculiar interest and enthusiasm. Though the Poetics is not an elaborate treatise on technical practice, it is exhaustive in its examination of principle, and the condensed philosophical epigrams, which drop from the writer in a manner elsewhere unusual to him, show how deeply he had thought upon the subject. Every species of poetry which the Greek world had yet produced is considered by him; so that in the Poetics we have a study of all the varieties of the art close to the source of nature, and unobscured by those conflicts of nations and languages, of religions and philosophies, which have since confused the human imagination.

What wonder then that Aristotle's treatise on Poetry should have been accepted by a large portion of the world with the reverence due to the utterance

of an inspired law-giver? That in France the oracles he was supposed to have delivered on the question of the Dramatic Unities should have been allowed to control the stage practice of the greatest poets? That in Germany, Lessing, the immediate forerunner of Goethe and Schiller, should have avowed his faith that the Poetics of Aristotle was as infallible as the Elements of Euclid? The wonder rather is, that in England the authority justly belonging to this work should not have been recognised. It is no doubt the case that, from the days of Sidney and Ben Jonson down to the time of the First Reform Bill, a considerable section of the English world of letters have endeavoured to reinforce the advocacy of their own opinions with the supposed doctrines of Aristotle; but, on the other hand, the Poetics has never been, like the Ethics and Politics, prescribed as a systematic part of liberal education in this country; the general tendency has rather been to deny the judicial competency of Aristotle to intervene in any controversy of modern taste.

This disposition is mainly the result of a belief that Aristotle's doctrines are in some way hostile to our darling liberty. To any one who understands the Poetics it will be clear that men who reason thus are the victims of a gross superstition; still, it is unquestionable that, either from a misunderstanding of his text or from political and national prejudices, the meaning of the philosopher has, in many passages, been egregiously perverted by his would-be disciples, and in such a way as to bring discredit on his teaching.

If we are rightly to value the Poetics, we must separate what is essential in the treatise from what is merely local and accidental; and I shall therefore attempt first to examine the principles on which the reasoning of Aristotle about Fine Art depends, and then to distinguish these from the purely technical rules which have been elevated by critical tradition into such disproportionate importance.

The three main principles underlying Aristotle's criticism are: (1) That the function of Poetry, as of all Fine Art, is imitation, not instruction; (2) That the object of imitation in Poetry is the Universal, not the Particular; and (3) that the test of the justice of poetic imitation is the permanent pleasure produced in society by the work, not merely the pleasure felt by the artist in creating it. With regard to the first of these propositions, Aristotle found the term Imitation established in popular usage; the Greeks had perceived instinctively that the first aim of every artist was to imitate an object. It was for this very reason that Plato objected to art itself as immoral ; since he supposed it to be the aim of the poet and painter to copy what was essentially false, as being only an imperfect resemblance of true Being. Aristotle, with profounder insight into the nature of human instinct, accepted the popular term, and explained the origin of Poetry as follows : "Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other