not five drops of poetic essence could be distilled from his entire philosophy. But over against him may be set men like Plato, in whom the wealth and color of Athenian life are preserved as they are in no contemporary artist; Plotinus; Spinoza; and Hegel, in whom the sense of the dramatic and the grasp of divine adventure are unusually strong.

Go a step farther and get beyond the artist's pose and the philosopher's clannishness, and you will find them both creatively self-expressive. There the common bond seems to lie. While there are artists who are merely transmissive, sensuously and emotionally, and in whose art there is not the slightest tinge of intellectual expression; there are others— a majority, I should say who react intellectually as well as emotionally and whose work is shot through with thought. There is more than swing and clatter in Kipling, more than cobblestone verse in the later Browning; Rodin thinks with his chisel, and Klinger with his brush. If Rodin had never jotted down his thoughts or allowed himself to be interviewed, we should still feel the intellectual force of his work; if Wagner had never written his essays or letters we should feel the philosophy of Schopenhauer throbbing in the very music of Tristan und Isolde. With philosophy it is very much the same. If there is such a thing as a pure thinking machine it is the scientist, not the philosopher. Philosophy might seem to have freed itself once for all from its early

closeness to poetry when it exchanged the majestic verse of a Lucretius or an Empedocles for a crabbed terminology and a jargon not unlike cracked varnish, but the artistic foundation is still there. The expression of self has simply become less naïve. This may be seen by taking nature and natural phenomena as they appear in the philosophy of Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, and Hegel.

In Empedocles there is a very direct interest in nature; the sea and the stars flash in his verse, and the panorama of life is given with much of its color. He seeks to interpret, to grasp general laws, but his thought has not worked itself loose from imagery. With Marcus Aurelius the interest in nature is much less direct. His enthusiasm for the universe, the City of Zeus, his delicate interpretations of natural processes as so much material for duty, his demand for loyal submission, are so many touches to the problem of realizing oneself, around which his thought moves. If nature is more than an incident in his philosophy it is only because he sees its importance and understands its place in the development of common man and Thinker alike. In Hegel the interest in nature is still less direct: the whole system of nature becomes a phase of cosmic self-realization. Enthusiasm, imagery, and in fact anything that might suggest the Artist, has been pressed beneath the surface, but what a subterranean romanticism there is in this Thinker! With what an

artist's imagination he has seized upon the dramatic possibilities of the human consciousness!

If, then, philosophy and art express more and more indirectly and reflectively certain heart-felt needs and certain personal ways of reacting, what will be the result? The mere asking such a question complicates it immensely. The philosopher must take himself seriously; he means to give the record of reality, and not the "human document" of his temperamental reaction to the universe. He must have his objectivity at all costs, even if he has to attribute to the universe, as Bergson does, his own élan and his own plasticity. He regards himself as the interpreter of world-meanings, and not as a child on a frolic. Back of the playfulness of a Nietzsche is a grim constructive earnestness. There is no philosopher who from an observer's point of view is more subjective; and yet, while Nietzsche is fully aware of the influence of his temperament on his thought and is constantly indulging in self-analysis, he does not seem to feel that such temperamental influences affect the truth of his philosophy. But an artistically rich philosophy is not on that account true. Still what if a pragmatist blocks a statement like this by interpreting truth as "the sentiment of rationality" and that in turn as so many ethical and æsthetic demands? There is one way out of this tangle: the Thinker may develop as fine a sense of loyalty to facts as such as the scientist's, and still have an

interpretative Artist's imagination and originality. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is not more difficult than the artist's task of combining idealization and imitation. The path from emotional resonance to such more and more indirect self-expression means a richer and a truer philosophy.

But what of art and the resulting complications in its field? The thought-strain is beyond a doubt strongly present in much of modern art: there is an intellectual undercurrent in our architecture and our music, and a great deal of intellectual symbolism in our sculpture and painting. But it appears most plainly in the novel and the drama. Rolland's Jean Christophe, the novels of Wells and Galsworthy, those of Hardy or Anatole France, flash with intellectual cross-lights of all colors. And what shall be said of the problem play, from Ibsen to Brieux, Shaw, Zangwill, Hauptmann and Bernstein? There is everything there: social theories; social criticism; intellectual fads and fancies; bits of biology and metaphysics; a criss-cross analysis of character. One feels constantly a tugging at the universe and its problems. The question of the artistic value of such developments is not one lightly to be settled. A poem like Rabbi ben Ezra gains immensely through its intellectual vigor; so does a play like Ghosts, but artistic disintegration can be seen in Damaged Goods, The Link, and The Doctor's Dilemma, and the collapse of a thought-riddled art can be imagined. On

the other hand an intellectual freshening would do our love poets and court poets and war poets no harm. The true value of thought for art seems to me to depend on its indirectness and emotional suggestiveness. This is the rôle it plays in Rodin and in Maeterlinck. They make you feel the thrust of the universe. Back of the artist's earnestness there must be a certain freedom or playfulness, just as there must be a certain earnestness back of the playfulness of the philosopher. Downrightness and eagerness to solve problems have spoiled many a play and novel.

Such are a few of the relations between Thinker and Artist. To follow the problem further lies aside from my purpose, which is rather to consider a few individual artists and thinkers, to get some understanding of their working beliefs, and to trace the intellectual and artistic motifs which are an important, even if at times hidden, part of their art and their philosophy.