however, that, sooner or later, the demands of the world's increasing population must outgrow the supplies of corn obtained from quarters in which it can be cheaply produced; the increasing demand, and consequently rising prices, will render profitable the cultivation of new land requiring costly irrigation or distant from markets or ports, and justify large outlay in renovating land already in use; and corn-growing in the United Kingdom will probably become moderately remunerative once more. In the meantime, there is every reason to believe that, so far as this country is concerned, the production of the best animals and their products, and of fruit and culinary vegetables of the highest quality, taking one year with another, will continue to yield a living profit. For these purposes the United Kingdom has natural advantages which are unequalled, on the whole, by those of any other part of the world. Not the least of those advantages are the skill and energy of our breeders and farmers, who have fought a prolonged battle against adversity with true British courage and persistency. But while they will continue to rely mainly upon their ability to help themselves, they have a right to demand from Parliament the removal of all impediments to a fair struggle with a world of competitors. No circumstances in the history of British agriculture in the nineteenth century are more striking than the sins of commission and omission for which the Legislature has been responsible, and it is to be hoped that more wisdom will be shown by the rulers of the country in the century now begun. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of doing all that can be done to render our agriculture permanently prosperous. Not only is it one of the greatest sources of our national wealth, but it is also the industry which maintains the very life-blood of the nation, supplying from its healthy rearing-grounds the void caused by the detrimental influences of townlife, and providing the best recruits for the Army and the Navy.

Art. III. ANCIENT AND MODERN CRITICISM,

1. A History of Esthetic. By Bernard Bosanquet. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.

2. L'Anarchie Littéraire.

Perrin, 1898.

Par Charles Recolin. Paris:

3. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe. By George Saintsbury. Vol. I. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1900.

4. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: The Three Literary Letters. By W. Rhys Roberts. Cambridge University Press, 1901. Is it possible for society in its collective capacity to exercise a reasoned judgment in matters of art and taste? Fifty years ago the answer to this question would unhesitatingly have been in the affirmative. For two centuries the sovereign centre of the community, wherever it lay, had succeeded, by whatever means, in stamping its own character on the art and literature of the time. After the Restoration of the Monarchy the controlling influence proceeded from the Court; after the Revolution of 1688 taste was directed by an alliance between the ruling statesmen and the critics of the coffee-houses; from the middle of the eighteenth century till the first Reform Bill, and for some years later, the body of opinion formed in the preceding generations, though it was being rapidly decomposed, maintained its authority in the drawingrooms of society' and in the leading literary reviews, and therefore formed a contributory factor in artistic production. In all these epochs it is possible for the historian to recover, through the national art, an image of the character of contemporary social taste.

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But in our day this authoritative direction no longer exists. The public, an innumerable multitude of individuals, with contradictory instincts capable of being æsthetically pleased, craves omnivorously for novelties, which are no less capriciously provided for it by the artist. Its taste resembles the course of one of those great Indian rivers which, after being swelled not only with the rainfall of the mountains but with the mud and sand of the plain, often freakishly shifts its bed and, sweeping away, to the despair of the engineer, villages and capitals, bridges and temples, finds a passage to the sea by some unexpected

channel. In such a state of things criticism has naturally disappeared. A book, for example, may in one season be sold in tens of thousands and be forgotten in the next; and so impossible is it to forecast the currents of public opinion that the most sagacious of publishers, when they cast their bread upon the waters, never feel sure that, even after many days, they will find it again. As for the professional critic, he is so overwhelmed with the quantity of the material which he is called upon in some way to classify, that he has no time to decide, on principle, whether its quality is good or bad.

This phenomenon is not peculiar to England. The lively and ingenious French writer, whose book is mentioned at the head of our article, gives the following account of literary taste within the rule of the French Academy :

"Take the works which have succeeded in the last ten years, and may therefore to some extent be classified: you will have before you in a heap some fifty volumes, which will represent currents of the most opposite ideas, the most various forms of composition and style, without the possibility of deciding which of these currents and which of these forms is dominant in the preference of the public. Every kind of taste is satisfied. . . . What you will find in each of the classes you examine will be essays, sketches, experiments, exhibiting every kind of idea, turning in every direction, even reactionary ones, harking back to distant centuries, reviving old fashions, even while affecting to despise them. And in this chaos what is there that predominates, or that carries conviction? The public takes all, swallows all, approves of all, indifferently. Nothing shows this better than the rage for foreign writers. In ten years public taste has shared its admiration between Tolstoï, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, Fogazzaro. Now Tolstoï is an ascetic socialist; Ibsen a misanthrope, whose individualism runs into madness; d'Annunzio an artistic free-thinker ; Fogazzaro a convinced believer. But what do these essential differences signify to people who, after applauding with the same enthusiasm the blackguardisms of the "Théâtre Libre" and the mysteries of "L'Euvre," are prepared to return with equal enthusiasm to the romantic plumes of Cyrano de Bergerac? Eclecticism, perhaps you say. No! Anarchy of taste, that takes its own fickleness for a supreme distinction, and its want of discernment for superiority of mind.'

In such a society what is to be done by those who seek

to promote the cause of artistic law and order? M. Recolin clearly thinks, however politely he may veil his belief, that the evil is beyond the reach of remedy. He gives it up, like the boatman in Virgil,

Qui adverso vix flumine lembum

Remigiis subigit, si brachia forte remisit,

Atque illum in præceps prono rapit alveus amni :

But

and perhaps, in view of the extent to which France has broken with her old traditions and abandoned her ancestral modes of belief, his surrender is not without excuse. we, who have preserved the continuity of our history and institutions, who have seen the structure of national taste built up laboriously by the criticism of men like Addison, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Scott (for Scott, as we are sometimes apt to forget, was a critic as well as a poet and novelist), cannot succumb to the forces of anarchy without disgrace. The farther our race extends its material empire, the more are we bound to proclaim the social necessity of cultivating what is noble and beautiful in the sphere of imagination. We must continue to row against the stream of bad taste.

Peculiar honour is, therefore, due to those who, like the authors of the two most important books upon our list, attempt to direct the attention of the more thoughtful portion of the public to the fundamental problems of art and taste. Each of these works is the complement of the other. Mr Bosanquet, whose name is well known in the world of philosophy, approaches his subject a priori. His History' deals with the philosophy of the Beautiful, which he assumes to be the object of fine art. Mr Saintsbury, who is equally eminent in the department of criticism, reasons on the other hand a posteriori:

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'The Criticism, or modified Rhetoric, of which this book attempts to give a history, is pretty much the same thing as the reasoned exercise of literary taste-the attempt by the examination of literature to find out what it is that makes literature pleasant, and therefore good-the discovery, classification, and, as far as possible, tracing to their sources, of the qualities of poetry and prose, of style and metre, the classification of literary kinds, the examination and "proving," as arms are proved, of literary means and weapons, not neglecting the observation of literary fashions and the like.'

Now if either of these purposes be accomplished, much will have been done towards furnishing a satisfactory answer to the question with which we started. If Mr Bosanquet is able, by tracing the æsthetic consciousness of mankind from early times, to show us that the artist has always had before him, though under changing aspects, the same ideal of the Beautiful, then this ideal must necessarily become a law to the modern artist. If, again, Mr Saintsbury can prove that in all ages the critic, when analysing the laws of beautiful expression, has found himself confronted by the same kind of problems, then it is plain that the mind can be educated to judge correctly of the merits of a work of art. We shall presently show that neither the philosopher nor the critic helps us by arriving at a practical and positive conclusion upon these points. None the less valuable are their labours in respect of the method they have each pursued, for, in treating their subject historically, they have brought together, by clear arrangement and sound reasoning, a mass of material which allows the reader to survey questions naturally difficult and obscure in the light of a lucid order.

Curiously enough, Mr Bosanquet and Mr Saintsbury, though they approach the subject from opposite sides, meet upon a common ground. Each is writing the history of something which, when strictly viewed, is confessed to be exclusively modern. Mr Bosanquet, while he defines Esthetic to be the philosophy of the Beautiful, allows that the term 'Esthetic' is not used in its modern sense before the latter half of the eighteenth century; and Mr Saintsbury, who occupies himself with the history of Criticism, shows over and over again that what he himself means by that term is 'Literary Criticism,' which, as he justly says, was a mode of judgment alien to the thought and institutions of the ancient world. Both writers agree in thinking that expression in art is an end in itself, and that æsthetic judgments are to be completely separated from moral judgments-a principle utterly opposed to the ideas of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Hence, as they treat the subject historically, it is necessary for them to preserve its unity by assuming that, on the one hand, the world's ideas of the Beautiful, and, on the other, the world's conceptions of Art, proceeding from a startingpoint which has practically ceased to exist, have been