III

16Noi Futuristi!Milan, 1917.

17Le Futurisme, by Maxinetti and others. 1911.

Recently an interesting controversy has taken place in theBurlington Magazinebetween Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. D. S. Maccoll on the question of representative and abstract or purely decorative form. Mr. Maccoll stands for the older school of J. A. Symonds; Mr. Roger Fry would assimilate pictorial art to music and deprive it altogether of a world outside itself. Both are in agreement as to art being non-photographic, and as to the existence parallel with or prior to visual emotional art of a photographic visual consciousness. Art, they both admit, is not reproductive; to reproduce is the function of photography and of the photographic side of our minds.

Art is temperamental, the expression in line and colour of emotion. But while Mr. Maccoll thinks that the emotion lies mainly in the rhythm of the objects represented, Mr. Fry considers that we are wrong in concerning ourselves either with the ideas and sentiments of the artist or with his interpretation of objects. We must appreciate and judge a drawing solely according to the degree of beauty the lines set up among themselves. Mr. Maccoll shrewdly points out that Mr. Fry and his school always lay great emphasis on "mass," "volume," "plasticity," etc., which are definitely characters of objects and, therefore, representative. It is possible, however, to go further: even a line and a colour are natural objects, and if we are able to find enjoyment in simple arrangements of lines and colours, why should we not find equal enjoyment in trees and clouds and hills and people? Stated thus these are generalities, but so are lines and colours: in a picture, however, or a decoration they are endowed with individual life, with a unique tone and significance.

In order to be absolutely logical, neither Mr. Roger Fry nor Mr. Clive Bell should attempt to describe or explain a picture at all. It is a world in a watertight compartment entirely severed and shut off from the ordinary world. It either throws us into an ecstasy or it does not, but these ecstasies are so many discrete units, and if they differ we cannot articulate the difference. We ought not, for instance, to describe early Italian art as ascetically religious, Botticelli as pagan and lyrical, Hogarth as satirical. For this would be ascribing to art a content extracted from life, it would be turning art into literature. Even literature, however, at its best is devoid of meaning. "In great poetry," writes Mr. Clive Bell, "it is the formal music that makes the miracle. The poet expresses in verbal form an emotion butdistantly related to the words set down." And he quotes Shakespeare's poetry as an instance of this great meaningless word music. This surely is thereductio ad absurdumof the whole theory.

Mr. Clive Bell defines art as significant form. At first sight it would appear as though the delimitations set up by the reduction of art to abstract form were swept away by the admission of "significance" which might include in its range the whole world. But the significance is indescribable except in terms of form itself. Hence there is a certain justification in Mr. Maccoll's contention that Mr. Clive Bell really means "insignificant form." In his reply Mr. Bell falls back on the conception of emotion. The significance is emotional, it is not only incommunicable except by means of the actual work of art, but is also totally unrelated to life in general: it is an intelligible and self-contained department of its own, and does not require the liaison work of the critical guide and commentator.

The fact is that in their most legitimate preoccupation of ensuring that the work of art shall be a world in itself, a unity whose essential significance and content does not lie outside itself in a world of which it is merely a superfluous copy, but is firmly grasped and held in its imaginative synthesis so that the content is identical with the form. Messrs. Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Co. have gone absolutely to the other extreme and deprived the work of art of all content and significance; they have rendered it a discrete unit instead of an individual unit. Now, there is only one mental activity which deals with discrete units, and that is mathematics. Hence we can detect a gradual assimilation in their critical terminology to the language of mathematics and physics. The mysticism of art is becoming the mysticism of planes, angles, cubes, surfaces and relations of lines and masses.

But Mr. Clive Bell has another and equally legitimate preoccupation. He has observed that he experiences the same kind of pleasure from a fine piece of architecture, a specimen of pottery, a decoration on a carpet, as from a painting inside a frame which ostensibly refers to people and objects existing independently outside the frame. And he concludes that all these works must admit of reduction to a common denomination, they all have that in common which induces us to call them works of art. Obviously as architecture is non-representative in the ordinary sense, we must excogitate a general definition which does not necessitate representation. And so by a simple classificatory abstracting process he arrives at the formula of "significant form."

Now this expressly refers only to pictorial art and does not pretend to be a definition of music, literature, dancing, etc. These, however, all come under the heading of art, and any formula for any single branch of art must contain something of the universal essence of art in general. This cannot lurk in the conception of form, because by form Mr. Bell means not the logical concept, but the spatial physical image. It must, therefore, inhere in the conception of significance. Pictorial art is something significant expressed in the medium of spatial form. But here we come up against thefirst preoccupation of eschewing all so-called literary content. The significance of Rembrandt's dramatic masterpiece, for instance, "Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery," must consist in the relation of the colours and lines to each other and not in its intensely dramatic human expression, which is an illegitimate literary association of ideas. The significance is wrapt up in the abstract spatial image and, therefore, so far from defining the essence of all art, including literature and music, it will not even cover dramatic representational painting. In his preoccupation of including decorative art in his definition Mr. Bell has excluded all other kinds of art, and has simply universalised the idiosyncrasy of decorative art.

He has not, however, really achieved that, because even decorative art has what Mr. Bell would call a literary significance. No one can seriously reflect upon Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architecture without admitting how profoundly they are charged with historical meaning, and that it is precisely this meaning which differentiates them and gives them their individuality. They are the spirit of their respective ages, caught up and embodied in what by an abstractive process of thought we refer to as abstract form. Actually it is only abstract when thought of apart from a particular instance: in any given instance,e.g., the Cenotaph in Whitehall, it is as concrete and individual as an ordinary picture or statue: it is a manifestation and expression of the human mind in a particular set of circumstances.

The foregoing analysis brings out two facts. The new art of abstract significant form is not, strictly speaking, anything new: it is as old, if not older, than representational art, and it is equally pregnant with literary meaning. Until quite recently, however, it has never been condensed into the form of a picture and surrounded with a frame; it has almost without exception been connected with objects of utility. This does not detract from its value in the slightest; it may mean that abstract art will outlive the picture; it is simply a statement of historical fact. Nor can we draw the immediate inference that abstract art is inappropriate in a frame. Certainly the contrary would be inappropriate: that is to say, if we built a house in the form of an Assyrian lion or made a hearthrug after Rembrandt's picture of an old woman. But it is significant that the cubist and futurist art has so far exercised a far greater and more beneficial influence in the direction of curtains, upholstery, and dresses than of pictures. Moreover, one of the leading English apostles of futurist art, Mr. Wyndham Lewis, is beginning to realise the immense field which lies open to him in the sphere of architecture, and is growing impatient with the limitations and narrow confines of the pictureframe.18

18The Caliph's Design.The Egoist Ltd. A brilliant piece of destructive writing.

However this may be, the lovers both of representational art and of abstract art must live and let live, and the wrangle as to which is the most perfect, the purest kind of art, is as sterile and futile as the dispute over prose and poetry, opera and chamber music, tragedy and comedy.

The problem, however, of photographic reproduction and of imagination still awaits a satisfactory solution. We have seen that no objection whatsoever can be raised against the marvellous representative detail of, say, Jan Van Eyck's "Jan Arnolfini and His Wife." Nor can we explain the joy and love expressed in the picture by reference merely to the forms and colours in abstraction from the objects and persons. For that would be transforming the living and individual unity of artistic vision into the abstract schemata of scientific thought. And art is not science, although it might very well express the delights and struggles of the scientist. But, on the other hand, there are pictures which, at any rate, appear to represent objects with the same accuracy and detail as Jan Van Eyck, and yet definitely fail to rank as works of art. They may often give us pleasure, they are often informative, but a little introspection reveals that that pleasure is due to our being reminded of something that is not itself in the picture, and that the information is not about our emotion but about an historical or a scientific fact. Similarly with the photograph which has still greater precision of scientific (not artistic) observation, and for that very reason is artistically still more jejune and barren. But there is yet another visual product which is neither photographic nor artistic "reproduction," namely, imaginative representation. From internal as well as external evidence we can infer that certain pictures were painted by the artist "out of his head," and others from "the models," and we find that artists like Velasquez, who painted masterpieces from the model, often failed miserably in their attempts at imaginativework.19Of course, it is doubtful how far this distinction can be carried; for we have no direct proof that many of the most realistic pictures were not pure inventions, and that much of the apparently imaginative work, such as Blake's, was not simply composite memory. Imagination is just as dangerous and ambiguous a term as reproduction.

19Cf. "La Couronnement de la Vierge." A voluminous mass of pompous clothing floating on some well-fed babies' heads.

These, then, are the "facts" to be explained. On the one hand, we have undeniably a reality of perception and photography which is not that of art but often extraordinarily akin to it; on the other hand, we have a visual art which divides itself into three groups, each of whichquaart is of equal value: realistic, imaginative, and, thirdly, formal, decorative, or abstract art. What is desired is some synthetic conception which will make intelligible the similarities and differences and contradictions dwelling in these, at any rate, superficially different kinds of vision.

Behind the conception of thinkers like J. A. Symonds there always lay the photographic reality which was the common reality of everyone, and supplied all the materials for the artist's reality: the framework of forms and colours, of objects and persons. It was regarded from the æsthetic point of view as rather a nightmare, for it was so unemotional, so much the same all through, so unpliable. And the explanation of art was that it consisted of thissame reality, but as seen through the temperament of the artist and, therefore, somehow, by some mysterious wizardy, coloured with emotion, electrified into all kinds of subjective illuminations, a fascinating mirage. Or instead of the word temperament one substituted the phrase creative imagination. This means substantially the same thing, but it leads us away a bit further from photographic reality, widening the gulf between the two. We cannot create the outer world, but we can create an inner world of imagination, and actually bring into our life something intimately new, shedding a light of its own that never was on sea or land. Drive this argument a little further and we arrive at Cubism and Futurism.

This is the philosophical view which dominates most art criticism of to-day, and probably quite rightly so. It is fairly safe, and it "corresponds to the facts" with tolerable accuracy. It is sufficiently eclectic not to offend either an ardent philosophical realism or an ardent idealism. And it does not fall into the error of condemning one kind of art and exalting another, although our æsthetic taste when unprejudiced by theory proclaims both kinds equally delightful. This, however, is no reason why we should not attempt to deepen the theory with a view to giving it a closer organic unity and explaining facts which it does not seem at present to take into account. Needless to say, we may get entangled and strike out on a wrong track. For thinking, like everything else, is experimental.

1. The very first observation to be made is that ordinary vision is not photographic: it is shot through and through with emotional elements which are part and parcel of every concrete colour and form that is seen. The photographic reality is obtained by a process of thinning down, so that only the skeleton of similarities remains. It consists of a consciousness of general facts—this is a tree, it has leaves with clearly delineated edges, underneath it is a brown and white cow.

2. Nevertheless, even if the normal man in the street were to depict precisely the semi-emotional reality which he sees, it would not necessarily be a work of art. The Royal Academy is a convincing proof of this fact. But this is not because the normal man's vision is essentially different from that of the artist; the reason is just the opposite: his seeing is borrowed from the artist, it is second-hand property. Considered in connection with the co-ordinated arrangement of the ordinary man's life this borrowed vision is absolutely correct and in its place, just as is his borrowed knowledge of science, mathematics, history. But if he tries to isolate it and put it apart in a frame, claiming for it an original independent value, it immediately becomes false, pretentious, sentimental. It still, however, is not photographic: it is an emotion out of place. There is, of course, also in Academy pictures a great deal of photography, that is to say of general statement.

3. The artistic disvalue of such statements lies not in the fact that they are reproductive and "true to nature," but in the deliberate stripping of allemotional content. So far from giving a completer and truer account of reality, the photograph gives a thoroughly impoverishedaccount.20It must not, however, be inferred that art should assist or take the place of, say, geological drawings, because these drawings are intentionally confined to similarities and general facts.

20The cinematograph drama might become genuine art, because one can look through the generality of the photograph into the human imaginative synthesis. It is on a par with a photograph of a picture or of a building.

4. The conception of the "creative imagination" is liable to lapse into a false kind of mysticism. Imagination is always about reality. Rembrandt possessed a marvellous imagination, yet for that very reason he has considerably increased and enhanced the human consciousness of reality. In the same way the interior of a beautiful church evokes and deepens our consciousness of religious emotion, and, therefore, of the profound significance of life. And it is not the life of some abstract mysticism, but of man in the travail of history. All art is imaginative, but it is equally real and objective, it adds to our consciousness of the world in which we live. We need not even object to the metaphor about holding the mirror up to nature, for we cannot see ourselves except in a mirror.

It might be possible, therefore, to overcome the apparent distinction between "painting from the model" and "out of one's head," and to show that they are both the same kind of activity. There is no doubt that imaginative work has its roots in ordinary perception; even the creator of pure designs is using lines and colours which are visible, and he gets his suggestions from the external world. And even though in the process of creating the artist seems to move away from external reality into his inner being, the created product is definitely about external reality. The Cenotaph in Whitehallisour mourning over the dead: Goya's etchingsThe Disasters of War arepart of our concrete consciousness of war. Blake, too, where he is not lost in impossible symbolism, is always referring back to life.

On the other side, every piece of ordinary perception is shot through with imagination, as with emotion. The mind is not atabula rasa, but a most marvellous and intricate activity. And there is another explanation possible of the difference between the art, say, of Velasquez and of Fra Angelico than that the one was reproductive, the other the work of fantasy. At the time of Velasquez the whole interest and value of life centred round man and pre-eminently round the life of kings and nobles. On these people was focussed the emotional imagination of the age. To Fra Angelico the world was altogether different; its quintessential value lay outside it in our experience after death: this life was but a preparation for the next, and art was as it were the imaginative anticipation of the loveliness of heaven. Nevertheless, this anticipation spoke in terms of the most refined delights of this world, and the pæan to heaven was but a pæan to the beauty of life. Or if one may diverge from the artist to an appreciator of art, it is clear fromMr. Clive Bell's book,Art, that at the back of his mind there is a mystical metaphysics, a sort of conviction that the objects and events of this muddled material world are contemptible, and that we must seek for the reality of realities in some aloof inhuman state of consciousness. This is his third and in many ways most interesting preoccupation.

5. Each of the three definitions of art referred to at the beginning of this essay, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, sets up claims which must be satisfied if we do not want to be continually dogged by their importunate ghosts. One of the strongest objections to Plato's premise that the artist imitates is that it does not allow any element of novelty. It is true that in the physical act of painting the artist reproduces his vision, and that this act requires considerable technical accomplishment. But throughout the principal, all-powerful, radiating influence is the vision. This cannot correctly be called reproductive; it is just the unmediated consciousness of something, and of that something for the first time. For instance, the artist apparently works with a limited number of colours just as the musician with notes; but out of these he produces entirely new colours in combination (colours are never really out of combination), just as the musician produces literally new sounds. And this production is not a mere abstract physical fact, it is emotional and can contain the whole significance of a given period of history. The seeing of the colours and the emotional impulse coincide: it is an act of creation. Nor do the colours belong, so to speak, merely to the artist's palette and canvas, they are seen out there "in nature." It is a new vision of nature. It is, however, futile for the man in the street, when he sees the picture for the first time, to refer back to his own past experience, because this is a new experience, a new vision. At the same time, although the picture is hung up indoors in a room or gallery, the vision pierces, as it were, right through the canvas and walls and comes to a halt out there in the mysterious and infinite world. We have seen that this process of consciousness is undoubtedly imaginative, even if the completed product is almost historically real. It is not a mere statement of fact, but it always includes facts, surrounding them with concrete living individuality. Further, it always contains an element of the ideal, of aspiration, not of an abstract schematised Utopia or stereotyped moralising, but of a pulsating individual love and hate. In all art, even in the most realistic, this is transparent. It is, in a sense, the goodwill bending over the present and dreaming of the future.

Briefly, pictorial and plastic art is the creation of the visual feeling or emotional consciousness of the human mind. As such it is inseparably bound up in real objects, actions, and events. Remove it (speculatively in thought) and you get the bare though magnificent framework of science and the stark matters-of-fact of history.

By J. C. SQUIRE

INrecent years several editors have put together anthologies of English prose passages, among them Mr. S. L. Edwards (An Anthology of English Prose; Dent), Messrs. Broadus and Gordon (English Prose; Milford), Mr. Treble (English Prose; Milford), and Professor Cowl (An Anthology of Imaginative Prose; Simpkin). Only the last of these books has much in common with the"treasury"21now presented by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. There are many kinds of good prose, of which Samuel Butler's is one, Jane Austen's another, Cowley's another: but the last two of these authors do not appear, and the first is only here by favour. A few exceptions are made, presumably owing to personal predilections or a feeling that such and such a great prose name should not be omitted. Swift is an instance. His prose, the faithful reflection of his mind, has many qualities, but it is out of place here. Generally speaking, to satisfy Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his present capacity, it is not enough—in fact, it is not anything—that prose should be adequate to its purpose, neat, easy, vivacious, well-knit. It must be prose on what by common consent is the highest level of prose, prose impeccably written, and prose with a dignity, a richness, a sonority or a sweetness of flow that rival the attributes of great poetry. Almost all his examples come into this category: he has no room here for the most vigorous pages of Scott or the most amusing chapters of Dickens. His extracts are to be detachable jewels, gorgeous or exquisite. On his fly-leaf he quotes Keats:

21A Treasury of English Prose. Edited by Logan Pearsall Smith. Constable. 6s. net.

"I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the two-and-thirty Palaces. How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence!"

"Distilled Prose," "grand and spiritual passage": the editor gives no other explanation than this second-hand one, but that is enough.

We must grant Mr. Pearsall Smith his ground, but on that ground every reader is sure—as an anthologist's readers always will be—occasionally to quarrel with him. His earlier selections, from the Bible, Donne, and Jeremy Taylor, could not, I think, have been better. He was bound to fill a good deal of his space with the seventeenth-century religious writers. He does not overlook South; and he gives a numerous and glittering selectionfrom Milton, one of the few English writers who have contrived to keep their singing-robes about them, with whatever effort, when writing about every sort of mundane subject. He has found almost everything that he could have wanted in the writers of the eighteenth century, and he gives many perfect passages from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Landor. But to some of the Victorian writers, and to some of our contemporaries (though he has quarried some exquisite things from unlikely places) he does, if he will allow me to say so, less than justice. We could have spared some of the eleven pages of Emerson for the sake of some of the best paragraphs of Ruskin, who is given only two pages. The single extract from Cardinal Newman (whoseIdea of a Universityshould have been searched) does not represent him, and no single extract could. There are two—there might well have been more—extracts from Mr. Doughty'sWanderings in Arabia. The passage from Samuel Butler is more sustained than Butler's wont, but scarcely worthy of inclusion, though the reader would appreciate in any surroundings his last sentence, "I am not very fond of Milton, but I admit that he does at times put me in mind of Fleet Street." Mr. Shaw appears and Henry James; there are good extracts from Mr. Santayana and Mr. Lowes Dickinson. But Mr. Conrad's works—both his Reminiscences and his novels—should have yielded many more than two pieces, and some admirable modern writers of coloured, musical, and affecting prose are omitted altogether. Mr. Hardy is a curious omission. Mr. Chesterton, as a rule, troubles too little to be a good subject for this anthologist; the journalist and the tumbler are always breaking in; the poet appears arm-in-arm with the politician, an exasperating contiguity. But I think that exploration would have been rewarded even had our collector gone no farther than the splendid last pages ofThe Short History of England. From Mr. Hudson's books, especially fromA Crystal AgeandFar Away and Long Ago, passages, I think, could have been taken which would have competed respectably with many that are here; Mrs. Meynell's essays and Mr. Bertrand Russell's last book should be drawn on; and where is Mr. Belloc? Rupert Brooke said that Mr. Belloc had a better prose style than any man alive. I should not dispute that: it is a clear, a precise, an economical style that serves admirably all the diverse uses to which its owner puts it. And it often rises, always quietly, where some poignant thing is clearly seen, into sentences of noble beauty. These are liable to occur almost anywhere; for instance, in a digression during an article on strategy. Possibly because he began his career with public facetiousness about "purple patches" he often seems to allow a promising passage to break its back because he will not seem artificial or affected. He fetters his consciously-exercised powers and he can seldom let himself go, as it were, unconsciously. In his books it would therefore be far more easy to find short passages than long ones of the kind included in this anthology; for any other sort of prose anthology his work should be thoroughly ransacked. Nevertheless there are long ones. My memory is that there are certainly several inThe Four Menand in the books of essays. To hunt forexamples which one will have no room to quote would be tiresome; there is a long passage inThe Absence of the Pastwhich begins:

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house; Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the house where she moved is there, and the street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the rooms she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.

But it is a stupid thing to spend much time talking about the omissions from a good book; only less so than it would be to complain that it is one sort of book and not another sort. Mr. Pearsall Smith set out to collect prose passages of a certain, the most poetical and resounding, kind; and he has made an admirable and a learned choice. A perusal of his specimens confirms in me an opinion previously formed as to the nature of this kind of prose in English. It is that we have a canonical style for such prose, and that such prose most frequently arises from meditation on a definable kind of subject.

In great writers and small, in those whose prose marches always with majesty and in those with whom eloquence is infrequent, in the graceful and the ungainly, in the magisterial and the familiar, this thing is to be discerned: that their prose is least personal when at its highest flights. The observation is common that we have in England no standard and accepted prose style, but a medley of manners which are continually increasing in number. This is true. But it has not been generally noticed that amongst those passages of English prose, drawn from authors of all our literary ages, which are received as being the most sublime and the most musical—passages which have been, and must be, the first resort of all anthologists of our prose who are in search of those attributes of power and beauty—there is a strong likeness of form and feature. There is more: the resemblance is often so close that the differences, normally marked, between the styles of writers divided by a great gulf of time are in such sentences not to be distinguished. Styles so various on the lower plane meet, as it were, on the higher: there is an established, an inevitable, manner into which an Englishman will rise when his ideas and images lift into grandeur. It is the style of the Authorised Version, a style in process of formation long before the date of that Parthenon of our prose, but reaching in that its perfection, and by means of that made an element of the air we breathe, and many generations before us have breathed, in childhood. Even in writers who never entirely lose the marks of their eccentricity the most eloquent "purple patches" are always reminiscent. Emotion deepens suddenly, or reaches an expected climax; the results of reflection are summarised; by whatever route, the author comes to a place at which his expression assumes a sublimity of imagery and a perfection of rhythm; and with the emotionhe communicates is always mingled the throe of recognition. The note has been struck and a hundred neighbouring strings respond. The writer has stepped off the common road and into that chapel where there is one ritual and one mode of incantation. "Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." It is the Prayer-Book of 1549. "Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,Hic jacit." It is Sir Walter Raleigh. "These wait upon the shore of death, and waft unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star that they might be led to his place; wooing the remorseless Sisters to wind down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour." It is Bacon. "A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer." It is John Donne. "Methusalem, with all his hundreds of years, was but a mushroom of a night's growth to this day; and all the four Monarchies, with all their thousands of years, and all the powerful Kings, and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight—all in one morning in respect of this day." That too is Donne, and his subject Eternity. "Since the brother of Death daily haunts us with dying Mementoes, and Time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation." That is Sir Thomas Browne. "They that three thousand years agone died unwillingly, and stopped death two days, or stayed it a week, what is their gain? Where is that week?" That is Jeremy Taylor. "When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over." That is Sir William Temple. "The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful." That is Gibbon. "The stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their native country and their natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." The argument to theAncient Marinerneeds no specification. "Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better, than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall." That is from a dialogue of Landor's. "And it would not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness." That is Charles Lamb. "In her sight there was Elysium; her smile was heaven; her voice was enchantment; the air of lovewaved round her, breathing balm into my heart: for a little while I had sat with the gods at their golden tables, I had tasted of all earth's bliss." They have quoted that passage from Hazlitt'sLiber Amorisa thousand times. "Like God, whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain." That is de Quincey. "And again the sun blinks out, and the poor sower is casting his grain into the furrow, hopeful he that the Zodiacs and far Heavenly Horologes have not faltered; that there will be yet another summer added for us and another harvest." That is Carlyle. "To what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far." It is from Emerson. "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." That, if modern in conception, altogether traditional in cadence and in the phrasing of its close, is from Pater'sRenaissance. "We can therefore be happy in our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred and wrong." A peroration: the peroration from the Poet Laureate'sSpirit of Man. "And in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone—of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather." Mr. H. G. Wells, never a careful artist or fully aware of what language can be, permits himself some looseness in the phraseology of the passage from which that sentence comes, but he too falls, as it were unwittingly, into the old music. And here, from another living author is a piece of declamation which contains, indeed, sentiments and words which would have been foreign to the seventeenth century, but is a true child of its loins:

We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

This passage, summarising the conclusions that natural science unaided has been able to reach, is detached from a longer one: it occurs in Mr. Balfour'sThe Foundations of Belief.

*****

There is one music and one speech in all these extracts. It is not the result of deliberation, but it is not an accident, that they have so much else in common, that their very subjects are analogous. Chosen, however genuinely, at random and without afterthought, if they are chosen from the best, they will be variations on but a few related themes and half of them will be inspired by the direct contemplation of death. There are innumerable subjects which engage the attention, and they may be seen in countless aspects; but that large utterance comes chiefly to English lips when things, of whatever nature they may be, are regardedsub specie æternitatis. Whatever a man's philosophy and whatever his mood, when he speaks with this music, he speaks with the voice of mankind, awed and saddened by its inscrutable destiny. Time, Death, Eternity, Mutability: those words, the most awful that we know, insistently recur. It is they, unuttered yet present, which give their grandeur to pronouncements of many kinds which do not relate directly to the general operations of Time or of Death: to Burke's passage on Marie Antoinette, to Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary, to Gibbon's moonlight reverie on the conclusion of his History. Those names, those figures with their skirts of thunder and doom, trail through all our literature with a majesty that no others possess. Apostrophising those our shadowy tyrants, celebrating them, rebelling against them, we may clothe our conceptions in many images, though even here, for the most part, we must observe a tendency, natural and spontaneous, to choose as tokens and ornaments a few, in the earthly sense, universal and perennial things. But those shapes tower over our whole world. Anything we look at in the sunlight, a wave, a weed, a travelling insect, may be like a window opening out to them; and at night, under the dark sky, so actual and so symbolical, the reflective man is always aware of them. We have our activities and our distractions. We must satisfy our carnal cravings, eat, drink, and sleep; between birth and death, under that immense and unresponsive heaven, we build and dig, hunt and dance, carve and paint, intrigue, copulate and kill. But whenever the moment comes that we turn round from our toys it is one spectacle that we see: life proceeding from darkness to darkness, change, dissolution, and death. And the greatest utterance of our tongue is a chronicle, again and again resumed and repeated, of the wonder and dread, the certain regret and the wavering hope which that spectacle arouses in hearts which have immortal longings but have loved transient things: a chronicle of grass that withers, leaves that fall, of girls like flowers who fade like flowers, of conquerors who are dust, blown about, of tough oaks that decay, of stone temples and pyramids that as surely, after a few more years, fall into dust, of the world's past, and the past of the individual which cannot be recovered, the innocenceand the illusions of childhood, the loss of which typifies all loss and their beauty that Eden to which, with the shadow approaching, we pitifully aspire: all framed by the most abiding things that our senses know, the sea and the wind and the hills, the seasons which come for all generations in their order, the stars, constant, silent, vigilant over all: those also transitory after their own kind, arching to their fall in epochs beyond our computation or guessing, but in relation to us steadfast and immutable.

They say (though I do not believe it) that an age, even if it be still far distant, is coming in which the present preoccupations of man, both physical and mental, will have vanished and new passions and new hopes will have taken their place. Our contact with each other is as yet imperfect; psychological discovery is only beginning; the gates between mind and mind will all be broken down; it will not be a question of universal candour but of automatic communication and sympathy. The individual will be identified with the race, will live only in the life of the race, will not merely not fear but will not even think about any death which does not involve the death of the race. The race will be one animal; its members, sloughed and replaced, will want no more immortality than that qualified perpetuation which the race can give; no two persons will be more to each other than any other two; Man will really be Man and will cease to be men. Should that time come (which, speaking diffidently, it will not) the voice of Man may change. His most eloquent words may be other than they are now, and even though, in his corporate form, he is still most deeply stirred by frustrations that we cannot conjecture, the range of his imagery will have altered, he will have new symbols for his regrets, and new comparisons for his ideas. Pending that change there is no reason to suppose that the essential, or to a large extent the incidental, material of our poetry, or of such of our prose as aspires to the condition of poetry, will substantially alter. We speak most sublimely of what moves us most deeply.

But this is not to say that we should wish that such speech, at the cost of such experience, should be more than intermittent. Sun, sheep, and children may take a sober colouring from the eye that has been much busied with such watchings, but they were not put there solely for that purpose; even if we profess ignorance of the reasons for their existence, we shall employ ourselves better if we act on the assumption that they were not. The last word, after so prolonged a meditation on the incomprehensible, may lie with Stevenson who, not unaccustomed to the thought of death and not incapable of poetry, wrote an essay on the subject which might not supply passages "distilled" enough for this book, but contains many so sensible that they might well be reprinted in others. "The changes wrought by death," he said, "are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth." That opening might have led to a piece of great orchestral prose; but he turned on himself and wrote instead some pages of cheerful colloquial prose, sprinkled with fine sentences. In all views andsituations "there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind"; and "as a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances." But notice, even in this essay, the old lift, the old attitude, the old accents, when momentarily he looks out over the other wall: "Into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Prætorian throws us over in the end!"

By CANON N. EGERTON LEIGH

MYcollection of autographs was begun by Lady Sitwell, of Rempstone, who married, 1798, Sir Sitwell Sitwell, Bt., M.P., who died in 1811. She married secondly, as his second wife, my grandfather in 1821, and died in 1860. Lady Sitwell knew everybody, and entertained a good deal. She was a blue-stocking in the days of their power, and most of the letters were written to her by the eminent men and women of the day. But her friends supplied her with other autographs—for instance, Longfellow sends her George Washington and Benjamin Franklyn. The following remarks by Washington are interesting at the present time: "At the beginning of the late war with Great Britain, when we thought ourselves justifiable in resisting to blood, it was known to those best acquainted with the different conditions of the combatants and the probable cost of the prize in dispute that the expense in comparison with our circumstances as Colonists must be enormous, the struggle protracted, dubious, and severe. It was known that the resources of Britain were, in a manner, inexhaustible, that her fleet covered the Ocean, and that her troops had harvested laurels in every quarter of the globe. Not then organised as a nation, or known as a people upon the earth, we had no preparation. Money, the nerve of war, was wanting. The sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity: the treasury to be created from nothing. If we had a secret resource unknown to our enemy, it was in the unconquerable resolution of our citizens, the conscious rectitude of our cause, and a confident trust that we should not be forsaken by Heaven. The people willingly offered themselves to the battle, but the means of arming, clothing, and subsisting them, as well as of procuring the implements of hostility, were only to be found in anticipations of our future wealth. Paper bills of credit were emitted, monies borrowed for the most pressing emergencies, and our brave troops in the field unpaid for their services. In this manner, Peace, attended with every circumstance that could gratify our reasonable desires, or even inflate us with ideas of national importance, was at length obtained. But a load of debt was left upon us. The fluctuations of, and speculations in, our paper currency had, but in too many instances, occasioned vague ideas of property, generated licentious appetites, and corrupted the morals of men. To these immediate consequences of a fluctuating medium of commerce may be joined a tide of circumstances that flowed together from sources mostly opened during and after the war. The ravage of farms, the conflagrations of towns, the diminution——" Here the MSS. abruptly stops, but we can imagine what would follow.

Mr. Herrick, of Beaumanor Park, gave Lady Sitwell the earliest autograph in the collection, a letter of Robert Herrick from St. John's, Cambridge,which I lent to the late Professor Moorman for his life of Robert Herrick. A curious entry in his uncle's account books discloses the fact that while the impecunious student was finding infinite difficulty in obtaining his quarterly allowance of £10, the wealthy uncle was borrowing hundreds of pounds from the nephew. I pass on to a letter of Lord Byron's accepting an invitation to dinner with Lady Sitwell. In it he says, "The song you have been good enough to send had escaped my observation or my memory when in Greece. I will endeavour to comply with your request. The copy has a few errors which I will try to expunge, though I have nearly forgotten my Romaic. I believe the words should be thus arranged." He arranges them, and then sends her, doubtless knowing her penchant for autographs, the following lines:

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