gathered and folded in one enclosure its flocks and herds whether from the rocks above or the meadows below, and entered on a safe, serviceable, dilettant husbandry of its resources, far more advantageous to the reflective and critical than to the inventive faculties; to prose, in its patient, plodding functions, than to poetry, in its bold insight, free aspirations, and tender, sympathetic

responses.

Poetry had already reached the central principles of art, principles which lie a primitive. frame-work of strength in all products of a truly great and original cast. It had thus comparatively little to expect from art, and lay open to the danger of a petty, superficial and exasperating criticism, that, forgetful of form as the expression of interior force, should refine upon it as a distant element, and, proud of minor corrections, set up inflexible methods and dead canons for the making of living things. Prose, on the other hand, an object hitherto of much less careful and refined attention, less sensitive in its structure, more homely and useful in its purpose, was quite ready to be profited by a new infusion of art, to be shaped as an instrument more aptly to its ends, and to accept at once a more artistic form and office. It was rescued from the harsh and exclusive service of dialectics and dogmatism, retained by the fancy and social sentiments, and set to a task of mingled pleasure and instruction. Thus the profiting of the period accrued to prose rather than to poetry; this for the first time be

came a fine art, and in the essay, took rank as an æsthetical product.

The causes which produced this artistic period were various. In the first place, a natural, almost inevitable, literary movement involved it. Great originality and inventive power cannot last long. There is not strength enough to sustain them, to hold unweariedly the gigantic stride. they involve. Fortune is too sparing in her gifts of genius to the race for this. But at the advanced position reached by invention, when the general mind is yet lively and restless, an ocean swept by a storm that cannot at once sink into repose, criticism and art take up their tasks with peculiar advantage. Unable to rival in new fields of effort the works before them, poets and writers are nevertheless too much lifted and quickened by past successes to fall into mere servile imitation. They become pupils, inquire into the method and details of previous products, and conceive the idea of perfecting them. They have before them abundant material, from which to derive the rules of art, to which to apply them; they nurse a critical taste, and reach a pleasant sense of personal power, not to say superiority, in laying down the precepts of more careful and considerate work. Thus it almost inevitably happens, that each great philosopher has his disciples, who correct and expand his system; each painter of inventive power is followed by a school of not unworthy men, who go forward to apply the new idea, develop its possibilities, and lay

down its rules. An age of invention, in expending itself, naturally gives rise to one of art.

Such was the sequence of the age of Pope upon that of Shakespeare, growing out of it under the transition period of Dryden. It could scarcely happen otherwise than that the later poets, losing the powerful, free impulse of the earlier ones, should strive to replace it by greater painstaking, should set themselves the feasible labor of refining upon their method.

The same influences, moreover, which had wrought for art in the transition period, still remained operative. The commanding age in French literature, that of Louis XIV., was still in force; and though political events less favored than in previous years the transfer of the French spirit, the French literature itself was more controlling than ever. Pope's Essay on Criticism unites itself to the precepts of Boileau and of Horace, and shows whence the current of his ideas descended to him. The classical influence was yet more independently powerful at this time than the French. The renaissance spirit was uppermost in France and in England, and as has been usual with it in art, begot imitation and servitude rather than power. Arnold says of Pope, "The classical poets soon became his chief study and delight, and he valued the moderns in proportion as they had drunk more or less deeply of the classical spirit. The genius of the Gothic or Romantic ages inspired him at this time with no admiration whatever. He can find no bright spot in the thick intellectual darkness from the downfall

of the Western Empire to the age of Leo X.”* How impossible is it even for that which is best to confer unmingled good! How much barren, unfruitful admiration has Greek art, poetry, sculpture and architecture, begotten; drawing the thoughts. of men backward, and binding them to that already done, rather than inspiring them for new achievement! The German must build his national Walhalla as a Greek temple, and adorn the palaces of his princes with Grecian stories, and that too when descended from an ancestry who could help to strike out and carry forward the bolder and more inspired styles of Gothic architecture. The classical spirit, revived in remote races and times, devotes those who implicitly receive it to comparative sterility. They can scarcely restore the past, certainly not enlarge it; and in the effort to do this, they waste the present and lose the future. The Greek is what he is to us because he was intensely true to himself, nursed and honored his own life. On these conditions only shall we command the generations that are to follow. They will hold lightly the shadowy outlines of an older life that we may be found painfully yet faintly renewing.

Taine says, "The arts require idle, delicate minds, not stoics, especially not Puritans, easily shocked by dissonance, inclined to sensuous pleasure, employing their long periods of leisure, their free reveries, in harmoniously arranging, and with no other object but enjoyment, forms, colors and

*Arnold's English Literature, 245.

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sounds." This is the Frenchman's view of art, and the one that partially prevailed in England at this period, prevailed so far as such sentiments could find transfer to the more earnest, practical, English mind. What it achieved we see, the results hardly commend the theory. When the artist has no other object than enjoyment in view, we believe that he will find great difficulty in realizing even this. High pleasure, like real excellence, is born of a more sturdy, and powerfully directed spirit. Witness the severe temperament and indomitable ideas that ruled Michael Angelo. It is the execution of cherished purposes, obedience to ideas, that confers pleasure, not pleasure that enthrones ideas. High enjoyment is ever incident to high action.

Another influence, aiding this tendency to art, were the science and the philosophy of this and the previous period. When natural science is pre-eminent over philosophy, when philosophy leans to materialism, to an interpretation of the laws of mind by those of matter, to a reference of knowledge exclusively to the perceptive and analytic faculties, we are sure to have a cool and critical, rather than a warm and creative, social atmosphere; one of skepticism and overthrow, rather than of belief and spiritual construction. Science plays a most inevitable and essential part in progress; but it does not, especially in its earlier stages, when it is coming in contact with many inadequate beliefs, and overthrowing them, give inspiration to the higher, * English Literature, vol. i. p. 332.