The critics seek a criterion of judgment and taste, and the best they find is "the judgments of the finest-nurtured." But these are often mistaken, and obviously they disagree with one another. Still the critics accumulate precedents and wall themselves about with tradition. "A man produces a work of art, like every true artist expressing in his own peculiar manner a feeling he has experienced. Most people are infected by the artist's feeling; and his work becomes known. Then criticism, discussing the artist, says that the work is not bad, but all the same the artist is not a Dante, nor a Shakespeare, nor a Goethe, nor a Raphael, nor what Beethoven was in his last period. And the young artist sets to work to copy those who are held up for his imitation, and he produces not only feeble works, but false works, counterfeits of art." (pp. 120-21.)

The striving for new effects has resulted in such confusion of the arts as Wagnerian music. "Wagner wishes to correct the opera by letting music submit to the demands of poetry and unite with it. But each art has its own definite realm, which is not identical with the realm of other arts, but merely comes in contact with them; and therefore, if the manifestation of, I will not say several, but even of two arts-the dramatic and the musical-be united in one production, then the demands of the one art will make it impossible to fulfill the demands of the other, as has always occurred in the ordinary operas, where the dramatic art has submitted to, or rather yielded place to, the musical. Wagner wishes that musical art should submit to dramatic art, and that both should appear in full strength. But this is impossible, for every work of art, if it be a true one, is an expression of intimate feelings of the artist, which are quite exceptional, and not like anything else. If poetry and music may be joined, as occurs in hymns, songs, and romances ... this occurs only because lyrical poetry and music have, to some extent, one and the same aim to produce a mental condition, and the conditions produced by lyrical poetry and by music can, more or less, coincide. But even in these conjunctions the centre of gravity always lies in one of the two productions, so that it is one of them that produces the artistic impression while the other remains unregarded. And still less is it possible for such union to exist between epic or dramatic poetry and music." (pp. 129-130.) Moreover, freedom from all preconceived demand is essential to the success of an artist, and the exigencies of adjusting say a musical composition to a poetical precludes spontaneous and original work and gives us counterfeit art such as melodrama, libretto, and illustration. (Chapter XIII.)

...

Mere arbitrariness is to be seen in Wagner's use of the leit-motif -a chord or combination of tones supposed to symbolize, suggest, or represent a Siegfried, a sword, a ring, a gnome, or fire. Music cannot thus represent an object or its character.

"There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint, on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art." (Chapter XV, p. 152.)

"The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art, speaking now apart from its subject-matter, i. e. not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits. And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three conditions:-(1) On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling transmitted; (2) on the greater or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted; (3) on the sincerity of the artist, i. e. on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emotion he transmits." (p. 153.) Sincerity is the greatest of the three essential qualities.

The goodness or the badness of art is determined by its subjectmatter. (Chapter XVI.) Art is the concrete expression of feelings that unite all men. "And only two kinds of feeling do unite all men: first, feelings flowing from the perception of our sonship to God and of the brotherhood of man; and next, the simple feelings of common life, accessible to everyone without exception-such as the feeling of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquility, etc. Only these two kinds of feelings can now supply material for art good in its subject-matter." (p. 164.)

The Christian art of our time is of two kinds: “(1) art transmitting feelings flowing from a religious perception of man's position in the world in relation to God and to his neighbor-religious art in the limited meaning of the term; and (2) art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people-universal art. Only these two kinds of art can be considered good art in our time." (p. 166.)

Examples of modern art of the first kind are: Les Miserables by Hugo; A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens; Uncle Tom's Cabin; Adam Bede by George Eliot; Dostoievsky's works. Examples of the second kind are harder to find, because modern works tend to present feelings of exceptional nature, to multiply details of time and place, and to be meagre in subject-matter as compared with, say, the story of Joseph. David Copperfield by Dickens; some tales by Gogol, and a few by Maupassant, approximate the requirements. In music, among the very few examples are Bach's famous violin aria, Chopin's nocturne in E flat major, and parts of compositions by Hadyn, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven.

"I must, moreover, mention that I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad art, excepting the story 'God Sees the Truth,' which seeks a place in the first class, and 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus,' which belongs to the second.” (p. 170 note.)

The two organs of human progress are language and art. (Chapter XVII.) The consequences of the perverted activity of the organ art are chiefly: (1) waste of labor and even of life; (2) extravagant amusement for the rich; (3) perplexity of simple folk and children the success of bad art makes them bewildered, or bitter, or induces them to mould themselves to wrong standards in art and life; (4) beauty-that which gives a sensuous pleasure-is placed above goodness, as in Oscar Wilde and the Decadents generally; (5) last and worst, the bad art now dominant infects men with the most baneful feelings: superstition, nationalism, and above all, sensuality.

"The task for art to accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor, now attained only by the best members of the society, the customary feeling and the instinct of all men. By evoking, under imaginary conditions, the feeling of brotherhood and love, religious art will train men to experience those same feelings under similar circumstances in actual life; it will lay in the souls of men the rails along which the actions of those whom art thus educates will naturally pass. And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union, will show them, not by reason but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life." (Chapter XX, p. 211.)

ARISTOTLE ON PLOT AND CHARACTER

INTERPRETED BY PROFESSOR BUTCHER

Critics of the story and the drama, and not a few story-writers and dramatists, have studied with profit and yet with some perplexity certain famous passages in the Poetics of Aristotle. By permission of The Macmillan Company, publishers, I quote from the translation of Professor S. H. Butcher in his Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 1911:

Poetics ch. vi-"Again, Tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by these that we qualify actions themselves, and these thought and character-are the two natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure depends. Hence, the Plot is the imitation of the action:-for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents. By Character I mean that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents. Thought is required wherever a statement is proved, or, it may be, a general truth enunciated. "But most important of all [the parts of a Greek tragedy] is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. . . . Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy-Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes are parts of the plot. A further proof is, that novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.

Poetics ch. vii-"Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Poetics ch. viii-"Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the inci

dents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. . . As, therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.

Poetics ch. ix-"It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the [tragic] poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen,-what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is-for example-what Alcibiades did or suffered.

"But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

Poetics ch. x-"Plots are either simple or complex, for the actions in real life, of which the plots are an imitation, obviously show a similar distinction. An action which is one and continuous in the sense above defined, I call Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal of the Situation and without Recognition.

"A Complex action is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both. These last should arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action. It makes all the difference whether any given event is a case of propter hoc or post hoc.

Poetics ch. xi-"Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. . . . Recognition, as the name indicates,