sion, I have seen that it is only a specific manifestation of that all-pervading force, of which each one possesses a share at his control, and which communicates the feeling and thought of the human soul to its fellows. Thus I am moved to perceive that for its activity it depends, like all other arts, upon Vibrations, upon ethereal waves conveying impressions of vision and sound to mortal senses, and so to the immortal consciousness whereto those senses minister.

In my opening lecture, I see that mention is made of the disenchantment to which "that airy nothing, the rainbow," has been subjected. But it is pre

cisely because we have discovered its nothingness, because we know its only being consists in vibrations which impart our sense of light, and of the color scale that Lippman has been able at last to seize this color scale, and to fix the negative reflecting the light of the eye, the flush of the cheek, to make the sunset eternal, to secure the myriad tints of landscape, in short, to make a final conquest of nature, and thus to enlarge our basis for the indispensable higher structures of the painter and the poet. Such realism cannot be ignored. It does not lessen ideality; it affords new inspiration. Each time when science fulfils our hope, the poet will be charmed to dream anew, and to impart from

INTRODUCTION

XV

his own nature to the semblance of his visions that individuality of tone and form which is the ultimate value of human art.

I have avoided much discussion of schools and fashions. Every race has its own genius, as we say; every period has its own vogues in the higher arts, as well as in those which fashion wholly dominates. There have been "schools" in all ages and centres, but these, it must be acknowledged, figure most laboriously at intervals when the creative faculty seems inactive. The young and ardent, so long as art has her knight-errantry, so long as there is a brotherhood of youth and hope, will set out joyously upon their new crusades. Sometimes these

are effective, as in the Romantic movement of 1830; but more often, as when observing the neo-romanticists and neo - impressionists, the French and Belgian "symbolists," and just now the "intuitivists," we are taught that, no matter how we reconstruct the altars or pile cassia and frankincense upon them, there will be no mystic illumination unless a flame descends from above. New styles are welcome, but it is a grievous error to believe a new style the one thing needful, or that art can forego a good one, old or new. Our inquiry, then, is concerned with that which never ages, the primal nature of the minstrel's art. Even sturdy thinkers fall into the

mistake of believing that a great work loses its power as time goes on. Thus Shakespeare's creations have

been pronounced outworn, because he was the last great "poet of feudalism." We might as well say that the truth to human life displayed in Genesis and Exodus, or the synthetic beauty of the Parthenon, or the glory of the Sistine Madonna, will grow ineffective, forgetting that these have the vitality which appertains to the lasting nature of things. No poet can ever outrival Shakespeare, except by a more exceeding insight and utterance. It is well said that great art is always modern, and this is true whether a romantic or a realistic method prevails. Doubtless the prerogative of song is a certain abandonment to the ideal, but this, on the other hand, becomes foolishness unless the real, the truth of earth and nature, is kept somewhere in view. Still, if any artist may be expected to pursue by instinct a romantic method, it is the poet, the very essence of whose gift is a sane ideality. The arbitrary structure of poetry invites us to a region out of the common, and this without danger of certain perils attending the flights of prose romance.

While the poetic drama, for example, must be realistic in its truth to life, first, as to human nature, and, second, in fidelity to the manners of a given time and place, it shortly fails unless surcharged

INTRODUCTION

xvii

with romantic passion and ideality. The drama, then, ever catholic and universal, is a standing criticism upon the war of schools, a war usually foregone whenever the drama reaches and maintains a successful height. I have suggested heretofore the probability that dramatic feeling, and even the production of works in dramatic form, will distinguish the next poetic movement of our own language and haply of this Western world.

But criticism of style and method should be extended to specific productions, and to the writers of a certain period or literature. To the essays which in that wise have come from my own hand this treatise is a natural complement. If inconsistent with them, — if this statement of first principles could not be made up from my books of "applied criticism," I would doubt the integrity of the one and the other; for I have found, in preparing the marginal notes and topical index of the present volume, that nearly every phase and constituent of art has been touched. upon, however briefly, which was illustrated in the analytic course of my former essays.

NEW YORK, August, 1892.

E. C. S.