obstructions are fully cleared. He is independent of any ecclesiastical or aristocratic authority. He is delivered from a scholastic tradition regarding style and subject. He shares in the emancipation of the individual brought about by social movements, and in the freedom of the intellect caused by modern science. He may face the whole of nature and the whole of humanity. It is his privilege to create the styles adequate to a great people and land. It is his opportunity to begin the epic of the modern world, the world as modernly known,-the world of Titanic forces taking birth. It is his mission to open for the imagination the universe as scientifically disclosed. It is his fortune to be able to set forth in all its nobility and grandeur the democratic idea, the idea of selfsovereignty and of sovereign association, the idea of a life self-poised and sole as stars, yet one as light. If art falls short of its present possibilities, the fault is not with the materials: it does not lie in any want of freedom, but rests rather with the artist who lacks the eyes to see, the mind to think, the skill to compose.

Yet again the fault shall not be alone with the artist, but with the people: art is the answer to a need felt in the popular heart. The people create: they furnish life for art's impulse, freedom for its atmosphere, patronage for its support. From them alone can come the impulse that shall hasten the production of a genuine democratic

art.

THE ESOTERIC TENDENCY IN LITERATURE:

BROWNING.

I.

The physical energy of the modern world seems to be expended in the acquirement of some external gain: material possessions, comforts and conveniences. At the same time the tendency of life, as disclosed in the more significant modes of art-which is life moulded nearer to the heart's desire-is in the direction of the esoteric. While the nations of the earth are struggling to gain or to retain markets, the art of the day is seeking to satisfy some desire of the heart, some longing of the soul.

By an esoteric art I mean an art whose visible forms are determined not by external but by psychic necessity. The art of a Greek temple is exoteric-it is an art whose aesthetic effects arise from form. Its materials are arranged with reference to external order. The law of visible proportions is inviolable. Its bases, columns, entablature and roof have logical and structural meaning. It is an art that is intellectual, precise, and without mysticism. Christianity released an immense emotionalism and with the consequent increase in mystic feeling, the formal orders of the Greek were broken up. In the course of the middle ages, in the period called Gothic, there were built over the face of Europe, in the lands where Christian ideal

ism was nurtured, structures that did not arise from the ground as form but descended, as it were, from the heaven as idea. These majestic temples seem to defy all structural laws-they seem not to rest upon the ground so much as hover over it-as if gravitation had been reversed, or as if they were suspended from some superior altitude. They are symbols of idea. I see in them not material form or laws of proportion, but multiple ideas. The materials vanish and one is face to face with living men-with the great mediaeval mystics, whose eyes pierced through form to psychic realities. Mind unifies the structure. It is genuine esoteric art. Exoteric art may be described as manipulation of materials to the end of form; esoteric art as the essential expression of the soul.

The proof of the esoteric tendency in art as a whole is discoverable in the phenomena of modern music and poetry. Architecture is more esoteric than at first appears; for when a builder inserts a window into a dwelling house according as the house needs the light of a window rather than as the exterior needs a harmony, or when he gathers his steel frame and terra cotta envelope about a man in an office instead of bringing columns from Greece and proportions from Rome to please the man in the street, he is employing the esoteric mode of structure. Such building follows the logic of function. Probably, however, the fullest freedom of man is found in those arts which are farthest removed from use, the arts of music and poetry.

The Tone-Poem, called "Thus Spake Zarathustra," by Strauss, is an illustration in point. It is a compo

sition striking in its originality and power, extraordinarily intricate in its modes, and more comprehensive in its scope than any music that has been heard up to its time. The significance of the composition resides in the fact that a most intimate union and correspondence exist in it between tones and soul-states. It is a music that follows no external necessity whatever. Its effects are measured in terms of psychology. Though freed from formal law it is yet bound by a profound mastery, the law of psychic process. It exhibits with absolute fidelity the history of a soul. It is a pure form of esoteric music. Now, if this composition stood alone, if the world had not been preparing to receive a music of this character for over a century, it might not signify a general tendency. But for a century music has been transferring its center of control from the outer to the inner. Mozart's ideal, for instance, was simple and perfectly organized progression, without great passional force. With Beethoven the outer relations are obscured in the interest of greater soul expression. An entire revolution was then wrought by Wagner when he conceived music dramatically, emancipated it from formal restrictions, rendered it capable of expressing the vast issues of modern life, and offered music forever to the free uses of the soul. Emboldened by his example the younger composers have continued to enlarge the expressive capacities of music until today it includes nearly the whole idealism of the modern world.

The poets who best represent the esoteric tendencies in literature are Whitman and Browning. It is a

matter of no little moment that two representative English writers of the nineteenth century were idealists. The peculiarity of Whitman's writings is that they can not be understood with any success if approached from the outside. The reader must be absorbed in the thing contemplated-he must become the poet, look through his eyes, realize the universe in his way; "I act as the tongue of you," said Whitman; "In my poems, all concentrates in, radiates from, evolves about myself. I have but one central figure, the general human personality typified in myself. Only I am sure my book inevitably necessitates that its reader transpose him or herself into that central position and become the actor, experiencer, himself or herself, of every page, every aspiration, every line." Other books remain standing on the outside of our personality and contribute only to our taste or our knowledge; this book incorporates itself with the reader and contributes pride, love, health, consciousness. By some strange process a man has actually got into a book and hence the book must be apprehended for its character, not for the mere grace of its manner. His writings derive from personality and to personality they return. To an occultist, a mystic, one accustomed to read the symbolism of words and forms, Whitman presents no difficulty. The spread of his influence, the recognition of his power, seems to indicate the increasing idealism of the modern mind.

II.

Browning displays his esotericism in three ways: in