And I have watch'd the death-hours of the old; and seen the

infant die;

The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;

And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;

And I myself for long, O Death, have breath'd my every breath Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.

And out of these and thee,

I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee,

Nor gloom's ravines, nor bleak, nor dark-for I do not fear thee,
Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),
Of the broad, blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling
tides, and trees and flowers and grass,

And the low hum of living breeze-and in the midst God's beautiful eternal right hand,

Thee, holiest minister of Heaven-thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,

Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call'd life,
Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death."

Though Inness's picture is filled with the gloom of the valley, yet I doubt not that when he passed through on his journey he might have uttered, with much cheer, the last words of Daubigny: "I'm going up to see if Corot has any new subjects to paint."

THE CRITICAL ATTITUDE.

I.

Two modes of criticism have been developed in the history of judgment which may be designated by the terms "aristocratic" and "democratic," on the ground that as the art of an aristocracy is the product of an exclusive culture, the object of the accompanying criticism is to develop and discipline "good taste," and as the art of a democracy is an outcome of generous human impulses, the aim of its criticism is to increase and fortify personality.

In a "classic" age, the ideal of which is to have and be the "best," the fine arts are patronized and enjoyed in the interests of an intellectual and special culture. The reader of books, reclining at ease in his library chair, assumes the judicial attitude and essays to find that in the book which accords with "good taste" and "right reason." He concerns himself largely with questions of taste, matters of style, and principles of correct composition. A Matthew Arnold selects a line from Dante and one from Chaucer and uses them as touchstones of propriety. The æsthetic canons that support this criticism. relate to principles of refinement, selection, symmetry, balance and proportion, the general effects, that is, involved in the standard classical canon of order in variety. The classical canon was a rule of temperance. The Greeks lived resolutely in the whole, loving equally truth

and beauty and goodness, proportioning the play of each faculty so as to secure the largest total effect of life. With the authority of their matchless achievements they imposed upon all succeeding art and criticism an æsthetics corresponding to their ethics.

But the classical idea of perfection, as it has received application in the modern world, is an ethics of restriction. Intellectualism dominates the process. Today to be cultured in the classical sense means to be intellectually refined and polished and to have the impulses of the heart well under the control of the head. To be socially aristocratic means to seek the attainment that only the few can achieve and to abhor the coarseness and vulgarity that attach to the general mass. So to be critically aristocratic is to love the good form and the grand manner that spring from a prerogatived culture and to detest the imperfections that belong to universal and humanistic art.

The first great force that affected æsthetics to the opposition of the exclusory canon of culture was Christianity. Christ directed the sight of the world away from the external to the truth of the inner life. The beauty of his religion is the beauty of holiness. The contest between the two principles of beauty is well illustrated in "Quo Vadis," by Henryk Sienkiewicz, which may be read as an allegory of the struggle between sense and soul in the transition period from paganism to Christianity. Greek poetry and beauty passed with the death of Petronius and Eunice, but a higher poetry and beauty was born at the marriage of Vinicius and Lygia. "Whoso loves beauty is unable to love deformity," said Petronius, the arbiter of elegance. But in the mind of

Vinicius was generated the idea that another beauty resided in the world, a beauty immensely pure, even though deformed, in which a soul abides.

The next considerable force that tended to modify the classical standards was science. Instead of the cultured man, science rewards the knowing man; and instead of the art of "good form," it advocates an art of true fact. In one sense science is an apotheosis of the commonplace. It exalts comprehensiveness. From its microscope, piercing inward to the atom, and from its telescope, pointing outward to the star, nothing is excluded that is inclusive. The love of pure truth which science. has engendered, and the truer view of the constitution of things which knowledge has brought, has had a profound effect upon both artistic production and criticism. The first great result of science was the dispossession of the field of art of its conventional themes and the substitution of realities in their stead. Painting and literature, the representative arts, have been the arts especially affected. The weary round of madonnas and saints that the church required of its pietistic painters gave way before the awakened enthusiasm of men for the common sights of the town and woodland-"the shapes of things, their colors, lights, and shades, changes, surprises."

Fra Filippo Lippi was in too early revolt against the religious theme to establish a method, but still in his ideas he was a precursor of scientific landscape art. Browning in his poem on this artist makes the painter monk say to his captors, the constables of Florence:

Do you feel thankful, ay or no,

For this fair town's face, yonder river's line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,

Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What's it all about?

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at?

If science had not then come in to answer this question "What's it all about?" and to construct a new and vital mythology of nature, we might still be admiring St. Lawrence toasting on the irons, or Jerome beating with a stone his poor old breast.

In literature science has rendered nugatory for modern service the whole body of imaginative myths and fictions. "Geology," says Professor Chamberlain, "has dispossessed Hades. A great field of gloomy imagery is gone. Dante's 'Inferno' is a literary phenomenon that will never recur. On the earth the whole category of ghosts and witches, of demons and dragons, of elves and fairies are gone, and the literary function they subserved is destroyed. The 'Hamlet' of the future may have its Hamlet, but not its ghost. Astronomy has swept away the mystic heavens and destroyed still richer and brighter fields of imagery. Aurora and Phoebus and the crystalline sphere are gone. The curtain of the heavens has been folded up and laid away as the garments of our children, as things loved but outgrown. Olympus is gone. Milton's cosmos, equally with his chaos, is only a picture of the past. The richest imagery of all past literature has lost its power save as the glory of the past. And this is simply because it was not true." Truth is indeed the key word of science. To this everything is sacrificed. But while old things have passed away, a new literary heaven and earth are being created, and upon the new materials imagination proposes to work with the old potency and