of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet the great artist."

Nay, he does not hesitate to inculcate a moral purpose nor lose sight of the higher fact that a man's words and deeds should be in harmony-a "perfect life in perfect labor writ," was his own ideal. "Cannot one say with authority to the young artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character forms of the novel so far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that, unless you are suffused-soul and body, one might say—with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love-that is, the love of all things in their proper relation -unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused

with beauty, do not dare to meddle with truth; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness. In a word, unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.”

This little " note for a Johns Hopkins lecture may be taken as his final word on this subject: "A man of mere cleverness can reach a certain point of progressive technic, but after that it is only moral nature which can carry him farther forward, which can teach him anything."

As a critic Lanier was more remarkable for penetration and apt characterization of particular authors than for range of sympathy and unerring judgment. He was often illuminative and interpretative, as when he says of William Morris: "He caught a crystal cupful of yellow light of sunset, and, persuading

himself to deem it wine, drank it with a sort of smile." And when he comes to speak of Shelley he is even more felicitous: "In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity; it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical, so that I call him the modern boy." He indicated with aptest words the weak places in Milton and Tennyson and Emerson. But his observation on Swinburne, "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt," is not so happy; for, as the Spectator has pointed out, no one can say of "Atalanta in Calydon," or even of "Bothwell," that there is nothing in it but condiment. And, on the other hand, the

service is by no means always of silver and gold, for the Swinburne verbiage is often so oppressive that the alloy presses itself on the attention a great deal more than the precious metal. The criticism on Thackeray is still wider of the mark. To speak of "the sub-acid satiric mood of Thackeray "—to stress it as a "mood of hate" and to say that "Thackeray and his school, when they speak of drawing a man as he is—of the natural, etc., in art—would mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as the daily newspaper gives "—is to misread the tenderest heart and to misjudge the finest art of all the great English novelists. The reason why Lanier could not see that

If he smiled,

His smile had more of sadness than of

mirth,

But more of love than either,

was rather a matter of temperament

than of heart.

Nor was there be

con

tween them that mental affinity which drew Lanier so strongly to George Eliot. Not only her philosophic and scientific mind appealed to him, but also her attitude toward life-weltanschauung-was genial to his manner of thinking. This, it would seem, accounts for the position he has assigned her, as attaining the height thus far reached in fiction of subtle portrayal of human personality-in the following paragraph: "You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master summed up all duty and happiness—namely, to love the Lord with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourself George Eliot's whole life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former. As for me, I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This, after