It

the rights of society. He says to the artist in effect: "Such and such are the laws of the human mind; in your compositions you are bound to obey them. is of course open to you to disregard these limits, and to seek to overleap them; it is even possible that, if you do so, you may, by ingenious and novel contrivances, succeed in producing momentary pleasure; but you will not be able to arouse that enduring and universal pleasure which I assume to be the aim of your ambition: hence you will not have created a work of Fine Art.”

So far, well. But Aristotle goes beyond this: he attempts from the Law of Unity to deduce a number of technical bylaws, and to impose on taste what we may call an Act of Poetical Uniformity. Here he is plainly proceeding ultra vires; he is invading the liberties of the poet, attempting, by means of logical analysis, to restrict the prerogatives of genius; and hence his critical edicts cease to possess universal authority. He failed to fathom all the conditions necessary for poetical creation even in his own age; much less could his analysis exhaust the springs of inspiration in the times that were to

come.

Yet so binding is the force of logic, so vast the intellectual power of Aristotle, that his followers, through many generations of the world's history, endeavoured to emphasise whatever was most faulty in his criticism. The deep and universal truths on which his reasoning was founded lay beneath the surface; his technical rulings were explicit; and

these the Italian, French, and a few even of the German critics after the Renaissance-some from a natural preference for Absolute Authority, others because they confounded the laws of taste with those of mathematics—sought to stereotype into a critical code. Without reflecting that Aristotle was only speaking as a Greek to Greeks, and drawing his inferences from a comparatively limited range of observation, the Castelvetros, the Voltaires, the Prussian Fredericks, accepted his local and particular rules as so many infallible Vatican decrees. They misconstrued the text of the Poetics; they deduced from the most casual remarks of the philosopher principles of poetical orthodoxy of which he never dreamed; they invented binding dogmas about the dramatic unities, and the limits of tragic action and character in short, while they entirely neglected his doctrine of the Law of Unity in Art, they disgusted all lovers of rational liberty by seeking to enforce with pains and penalties his Act of Poetical Uniformity.

Time has cured many of these aberrations. Modern scholars, particularly English and German scholars, have devoted themselves with admirable patience and industry to the elucidation of Aristotle's critical treatise. Among these we his countrymen have every reason to be proud of Professor Butcher's edition of the Poetics. In this, perhaps for the first time, the general principles of Aristotle's philosophy have been made to illustrate his æsthetic opinions; and the essential and universal elements in his criticism have been detached from what is merely

local and accidental with such beautiful lucidity, that there is now no reason why the Poetics should not be read by a Headmaster with the cleverer boys in any of our great Public Schools. All that Aristotle says about Imitation, the Universal, Poetic Truth, and the Law of Ideal Probability, is made to emerge in distinct relief like the clear outlines of Greek sculpture. And these are eternal truths. No man who has not an intuitive or an acquired knowledge of what Aristotle means by these principles can understand the necessary conditions of a work of Fine Art. Armed with this knowledge, on the other hand, he may penetrate the organic ideas in the work of Homer and Sophocles; he may confirm the truth of Aristotle's critical principles by observing how exactly his ideas have been followed by those who were separated from him by generations of time and diversities of religion and language; he may apply them to test the value of the artistic novelties which are presented for contemporary judgment. Perhaps in this gradual course of education he may rid himself of some of the scepticism implied in such a maxim as De gustibus non est disputandum. For human nature is the same in all ages, and, in the common consent of mankind about what is really great and beautiful in art, we find a sure intimation of the unity of the soul and a pledge of its immortality.

III

THE IDEA OF LAW IN FRENCH POETRY

FINE art, as I have already attempted to show, is the imitation, by the poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of any people, of the idea of the Universal in Nature. This idea springs out of the character of the race, the course of its history, the common perceptions of its men of genius. As the life of a nation develops, the practice of its various artists instinctively falls in with the growth of society, advances with it to maturity, and languishes in its decline. Sometimes, as in ancient Greece, the history of art seems to manifest itself with almost as much certainty and regularity as the life of a flower, or a tree, or a human body. The Greek poet discovered by a kind of spontaneous instinct how to express the idea of greatness in his race in the divine simplicity of hexameter verse; the Greek musician learned at a very early stage how to imitate human passions in dance and song. With the remarkable development of civic life that followed the Persian invasion the Greek architect and sculptor co-operated to embody in marble the loftiest ideas of religion. Instinctively,

in the same age, the dramatist combined, from the epic minstrelsy and the religious hymn, a mode of imitation fitted to express the profounder ideas of society about life and nature. With rare and delicate taste, Eschylus and his two great successors made the drama, in its progressive development, a mirror for all the changes of moral and religious feeling that transformed the Athenian mind between the battle of Marathon and the Sicilian Expedition. And when, after the battle of Chæronea, the Greek enthusiasm for liberty and the old Hellenic belief in the Gods died away together, the loss of imaginative energy in society reflected itself in the purely prosaic imitation of the New Comedy. In all directions the law of Greek art was embodied in the works of great artists, and, as I said in my last lecture, Aristotle's best criticism in the Poetics is not new legislation, but the declaration of the law of Nature already existing in art.

Had it been the destiny of Aristotle to declare the aesthetic law of any modern European nation, his task would have been far more difficult. In no Christian society has the artist shown the same spontaneous faculty for imitating Nature as in Greece. Many obstacles stand between Nature and the imagination of the modern artist. To begin with, he has been cut off from the fountainhead of his primæval instincts by the conversion of his ancestors to Christianity. Moreover, the nation in modern Europe is not constituted simply, as in the small Greek states, but is vast and complex, composed