which, differing among themselves, agree in this that they all alike aim at affecting the imagination. Works of art are produced, Cousin writes, because man desires to see again the beauty which has delighted him in nature or in real life. But he does not desire to see this in the same form; if he did he must go back to nature and real life. He desires to see it in the form in which the imagination represents it.

For this work of interpreting nature by playing upon the imagination, the novel in its own spherethat of presenting an ideal representation of contemporary life—is in no sense deficient. It relies solely on the power of words, claiming neither the music of verse nor the actuality of the drama, but what the representation has lost in these respects it has gained in freedom and completeness. This sole instrument, language, of which the novel, more than any other form of creative literature, has an absolute command, is the most powerful of all the instruments which the arts employ to affect the imagination. Can all the trappings or equipage of a king or hero give Brutus half that pomp and majesty which he receives from a few lines in Shakespeare ?1

Nor is it unable to speak with that distinctive accent which arises from the 'high seriousness of absolute sincerity.' 'George Eliot' uses it at times in speaking of Dorothea, of Hetty Sorrel, and of Maggie Tulliver. It is surely with this accent that she says of Romola:

1 Addison.

'No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision-men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action, which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.'

CHAPTER XII

AUTHORITY IN LITERATURE AND ART

In the preceding chapters an attempt has been made to set out the rules which govern the processes of artistic production, as they have been formulated by the several writers whose opinions have been cited. These rules differ only from observed uniformities in so far as they have been connected by each writer with some characteristic of the human mind. But since the human mind-that is, the sum total of man's conscious knowledge-changes with the development of the race, the rules of any one writer, of any one age, even when thus fortified, have only a partial and limited validity. When, however, we find a practical agreement on certain points between writers widely separated by intervals of time and circumstance, we are led to the conclusion that there are certain principles underlying these rules which have a permanent validity.

To exhibit this agreement, and these principles, has been one chief object of the analyses which have been submitted to the reader.

Broadly stated, the authority of the critic depends upon the fact of this agreement; and in order to

maintain his authority he must do two things: he must distinguish between the rules which are partial, and the principles which are permanent; and he must confine himself to an application of the latter.

This is the goal towards which criticism has advanced; towards which it is still steadily advancing. Its development exhibits a gradual limitation of the scope of its rules, and a gradual extension of the scope of its principles. In other words, the critic shows an increased and increasing capacity to discern what is amenable to his authority, and to confine himself to an examination of this element in the products of the special art which is the subject of his researches.

With Plato the critic is the legislator, who declares with the authority of the State both the subjects and the methods of the arts. With Aristotle he is the representative of Homer and Sophocles, who would make all epics Homeric, and all plays Sophoclean. Modern criticism commenced from this point. The seventeenth-century critic was the exponent of the Poetics, and even Addison began with the notion that Paradise Lost could somehow be measured by Aristotle's canons. But Addison, as we know, emerged from this stage, and discovered a principle of poetic appeal which enabled him and all subsequent critics to transcend mere formal considerations, by substituting the 'power to affect the imagination' for the test of symmetry. In so doing he emphasized the fact that the achievement itself, and not the

means employed to secure that achievement, ought to be the first object of a critic's consideration. If Lessing returned to the consideration of processes rather than results, and devoted himself to distinguishing the respective methods and resources of the contrasting arts of the eye and ear, he was nevertheless guided in his researches by the realization of this same truth-that the appeal of the arts was in all cases not to the senses, but to the imagination through the senses. Similarly Cousin, starting with the same truth expressed in terms of philosophy -that it is the ideal and not the real which is the object of artistic presentation-traces in broad outline the mental processes which accompany and distinguish artistic activities, and indicates the place which the sense of beauty holds as part of the intellectual and moral faculties of man.

The result of this change of the point of view is to be seen in the practice of contemporary critics. An enlightened criticism no longer aims at directing the artist by formulating rules which, if they were valid, would only tend to obliterate the distinction between the fine and the mechanical arts. It allows him to work by whatever methods he may choose; and it is content to estimate his merit, not by reference to his method, but by reference to his achievement as measured by principles of universal validity. In this way it avoids the danger of pronouncing an opinion on what is variable, and applies itself to what is permanent.