at once suggests itself, and in science I may be permitted to mention my own father. One might have supposed that banking was rather too prosaic for poetry, but the names of Rogers, Wright, and Praed prove the contrary. Among economists we have Lord Overstone, Mr. Norman, Mr. Bagehot, Mr. Hankey, Mr. Newmarch, Mr. Palgrave, and others too numerous to mention. Indeed, though I am by no means a follower of M. Comte, there is one of his proposals which has much to recommend it. He suggests, in the Catéchisme Positiviste, that the supreme government in each country should be intrusted to three bankers, who would, respectively, take charge of commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural operations. "A ces triumvirs," he says, "le sacerdoce occidental dirigé par le Grand-Prêtre de l'humanité, devra dignement soumettre les réclamations légitimes d'un immense prolétariat." I should have been disposed to think that, at any rate, such a government would have had the great merit of doing its best to preserve the peace of the world, though I confess that of late some of my friends have developed a fierce military spirit which fills me with astonishment. But however that may be, I think we may fairly claim for the banking profession

that they have done their best to deserve the confidence reposed in them. Let us hope the opportunities and advantages which will be afforded by the new Bankers' Institute will be a benefit to the profession, by extending a knowledge of the true principles of banking; and even perhaps to the public, by tending to remove those groundless apprehensions which from time to time, as, for instance, last year, have produced an entirely artificial stringency in the money market, and an elevation of the rate of interest, quite unnecessary in itself, and very prejudicial to the commerce of the country.

I cannot conclude without mentioning another class of banks-namely, the Savings Banks, which have done so much to promote frugality among the poorer classes of the community. The original idea seems due to the Rev. Josiah Smith, of Wendover, who, in 1799, in conjunction with some of his neighbors, arranged to receive small sums from the parishioners during the summer, repayable on demand, but to which he added a bonus if the balance remained until Christmas. The next Savings Bank, that founded at Tottenham by Mrs. Priscilla Wakefield, in 1804, more nearly resembled our existing Savings Banks.-The Nineteenth Century.

It is both interesting and instructive to hear what masters of a craft may choose to say upon the subject of their art. The interest is rather increased than diminished by the limitation of the imperfection of their view, inseparable from personal inclination, idiosyncrasy of genius, or absorbing previous course of study. When Heinrich exclaims, "There's no lust like to poetry;" when Goethe asserts, "Die kunst ist nur Gestaltung;" when Shelley writes, "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds," we feel in each of these utter

* "Poems of Wordsworth." Chosen and Edited by Matthew Arnold. Golden Treasury Series. Macmillan 1879.

ances-too partial to express an universal truth, too profound to be regarded as a merely casual remark-the dominating bias and instinctive leanings of a lifetime. lf, then, we remember that Mr. Matthew Arnold is equally eminent as a critic and a poet, we shall not be too much surprised to read the following account of poetry given in the preface to his Selections from Wordsworth : "It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life-to the question How to live."

At first sight this definition will strike most people as a paradox. It would be

scarcely less startling to hear, as indeed we might perhaps hear from a new school of writers upon art, that "Criticism is at bottom the poetry of things,' inasmuch as it is the critic's function to select the quintessential element of all he touches, and to present that only in choice form to the public he professes to instruct. Yet, when we return to Mr. Arnold, and compare the passage above quoted with the fuller expression of the same view upon a preceding page, the apparent paradox is reduced to the proportions of a sound and valuable generalization: "Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. I said that a great poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from his application, under the conditions immutably fixed by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, whatever it may be, of the ideas

On man, on nature, and on human life, which he has acquired for himself." An important element in this description of poetic greatness is the further determination of the ideas in question as moral: "It is said that to call these ideas moral ideas is to introduce a strong and injurious limitation. I answer that it is to do nothing of the kind, because moral ideas are really so main a part of human life. The question, how to live, is itself a moral idea; and it is the question which most interests every man, and with which, in some way or other, he is perpetually occupied.'

With the substance of these passages there are few who, after mature reflection on the nature of poetry, will not agree. That the weight of Mr. Arnold's authority should be unhesitatingly given against what he calls the poetry of revolt and the poetry of indifference to morals, is a matter for rejoicing to all who think the dissemination of sound views on literature important. It is good to be reminded at the present moment that Omar Kayam failed of true greatness because he was a reactionary, and that Théophile Gautier took up his abode in what can never be more than a wayside halting-place. From time to time critics arise who attempt to NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXI., No. 1.

persuade us that it does not so much matter what a poet says as how he says it, and that the highest poetical achievements are those which combine a certain vagueness of meaning with sensuous melody and color of verbal composition. Yet, if one thing is proved with certainty by the whole history of literature to our time, it is that the self-preservative instinct of humanity rejects such art as does not contribute to its intellectual nutrition and moral sustenance. It cannot afford to continue long in contact with ideas that run counter to the principles of its own progress. It cannot bestow more than passing notice upon trifles, however exquisitely finished. Poetry will not, indeed, live without style or its equivalent. But style alone will never confer enduring and cosmopolitan fame upon a poet. He must have placed himself in accord with the permanent emotions, the conservative forces of the race; he must have uttered what contributes to the building up of vital structure in the social organism, in order to gain more than a temporary or a partial hearing. Though style is an indispensable condition of success in poetry, it is by matter, and not by form, that a poet has to take his final rank.

Of the two less perfect kinds of poetry, the poetry of revolt and the poetry of indifference, the latter has by far the slighter chance of survival. Powerful negation implies that which it rebels against. The energy of the rebellious spirit is itself a kind of moral greatness. We are braced and hardened by contact with impassioned revolutionaries, with Lucretius, Voltaire, Leopardi. Something necessary to the onward progress of humanity-the vigor of antagonism, the operative force of the antithesis-is communicated by them. They are in a high sense ethical by the exhibition of hardihood, self-reliance, hatred of hypocrisy.. Even Omar's secession from the mosque to the tavern symbolizes a necessary and recurring moment of experience. It is, moreover, dignified by the pathos of the poet's view of life. Meleager's sensuality is condoned by the delicacy of his sentiment. Tone counts for much in this poetry of revolt against morals. It is only the Stratons, the Beccadellis, the Baudelaires, who, in spite of their con

3

summate form, are consigned to poetical perdition by vulgarity, perversity, obliquity of vision. But the carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound or color without heed for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure. The absolute neglect which has fallen on the melodious Italian sonnet-writers of the sixteenth century is due to their cult of art for art's sake, and their indifference to the realities of life. If we ask why Machiavelli's Mandragora is inferior to Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, in spite of its profound knowledge of human nature, its brilliant wit, its irresistible humor, its biting satire, and its incomparably closer workmanship, we can only answer that Shakespeare's conception of life was healthy, natural, exhilarating, while Machiavelli's, without displaying the earnestness of revolt, was artificial, morbid, and depressing. The sympathies which every great work of art stimulates tend in the case of Shakespeare's play to foster, in the case of Machiavelli's to stunt, the all-essential elements of social happiness and vigor. In point of form, the Mandragora has better right to be a classic comedy than the Merry Wives of Windsor. But the application of ideas to life in it is so unsound and so perverse that commonsense rejects it: we tire of living in so false a world.

Without multiplying instances, it can be affirmed, with no dread of opposition, that all art, to be truly great art, to be permanent and fresh and satisfying through a hundred generations, to yield the bread and wine of daily sustenance to men and women in successive ages, must be moralized-must be in harmony with those principles of conduct, that tone of feeling, which it is the self-preservative instinct of civilized humanity to strengthen. This does not mean that the artist should be consciously didactic or obtrusively ethical. objects of ethics and of art are distinct. The one analyzes and instructs, the other embodies and delights. But since all the arts give form to thought and feeling, it follows that the greatest art is that which includes in its synthesis the fullest complex of thoughts and feelings. The more complete the poet's grasp of human nature as a whole, the more com

The

plete his presentation of life in organized complexity, the greater he will be. Now the whole struggle of the human race from barbarism to civilization is one continuous effort to maintain and to extend its moral dignity. It is by the conservation and alimentation of moral qualities that we advance. The organization of our faculties into a perfect whole is moral harmony. Therefore artists who aspire to greatness can neither be adverse nor indifferent to ethics. In each case they proclaim their own inadequacy to the subject-matter of their art-humanity. In each case they present a maimed and partial portrait of their hero-man. In each case they must submit, however exquisite their style, however acute their insight, to be excluded from the supreme company of the immortals. We need do no more than name the chiefs of European poetry

Homer, Pindar, Eschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Molière-in order to recognize the fact that they owe their superiority to the completeness of their representation, to their firm grasp upon the harmony of human faculties in large morality. It is this which makes classical and humane literature convertible terms. It is this which has led all classes and ages of men back and back to these great poets as to their familiar friends and teachers, the everlasting solace of mankind."

While substantially agreeing with Mr. Arnold, it may be possible to take exception to the form of his definition. He lays too great stress, perhaps, on the phrases, application of ideas, and criticism. The first might be qualified as misleading, because it seems to attribute an ulterior purpose to the poet; the second as tending to confound two separate faculties, the creative and the judicial. Plato's conception of poetry as an inspiration, a divine instinct, may be nearer to the truth. The application of ideas should not be too conscious, else the poet sinks into the preacher. The criticism of life should not be too much his object, else the poet might as well have written essays. What is wanted is that, however spontaneous his utterance may be, however he may aim at only beauty in his work, or beauty in his work, or "sing but as the linnet sings," his message should be adequate to healthy and mature human

ity. His intelligence of what is noble and enduring, his expression of a full harmonious personality, is enough to moralize his work. it is even better that he should not turn aside to comment. That is the function of the homilist. We must learn how to live from him less by his precepts than by his examples and by being in his company. It would no doubt be misunderstanding Mr. Arnold to suppose that he estimates poetry by the gnomic sentences conveyed in it, or that he intends to say that the greatest poets have deliberately used their art as the vehicle of moral teaching. Yet there is a double danger in the wording of his definitions. On the one hand, if we accept them too literally, we run the risk of encouraging that false view of poetry which led the Byzantines to prefer Euripides to Sophocles, because he contained a greater number of quotable maxims; which brought the humanists of the sixteenth century to the incomprehensible conclusion that Seneca had improved upon the Greek drama by infusing greater gravity into his speeches; which caused Tasso to invent an ex post facto allegory for the Gerusalemme, and Spenser to describe Ariosto's mad Orlando, the triumphant climax of that poet's irony, as “a good governor and a virtuous man." On the other hand, there is the peril of forgetting that the prime aim of all art is at bottom only presentation. That, and that alone, distinguishes the arts, including poetry, from every other operation of the intellect, and justifies Hegel's general definition of Art as "Die sinnliche Erscheinung der Idee." Poetry is not so much a criticism of life as a revelation of life, a presentment of life according to the poet's capacity for observing and displaying it in forms that reproduce it for his readers. The poet is less a judge than a seer and reporter. If he judges, it is as light, falling upon an object, showing its inequalities, discovering its loveliness, may be said to judge. The greatest poet is not the poet who has said the best things about life, but he whose work most fully and faithfully reflects life in its breadth and largeness, eliminating what is accidental, trivial, temporary, local, or rendering insignificant details the mirror of the universal by his treatment. He teaches

less by what he inculcates than by what he shows; and the truth of Plato's above-mentioned theory is that he may himself be unaware of the far-reaching lessons he communicates. From Shakespeare we could better afford to lose the profound remarks on life in 27mON OF Troilus and Cressida than the delineatien of Othello's passion. The speeches of Nestor in the Ziad are less valuable than the portrait of Achilles ; and what Achilles says about fame, heroism, death, and friendship could be sooner spared than the presentment of his action.

The main thing to keep in mind is this: that the world will very willingly let die in poetry what does not contrib ute to its intellectual strength and moral vigor. In the long-run, therefore, poetry full of matter and moralized wins the day. But it must, before all else, be poetry. The application of the soundest moral ideas, the finest criticism of life, will not save it from oblivion, if it fails in the essential qualities that constitute a work of art. Imagination, or the power to see clearly and to project forcibly; fancy, or the power to flash new light on things familiar, and by their combination to delight the mind with novelty; creative genius, or the power of giving form and substance, life and beauty, to the figments of the brain ; style, or the power to sustain a flawless and unwavering distinction of utter ance; dramatic energy, or the power to make men and women move before us with self-evident reality in fiction; passion, sympathy, enthusiasm, or the power of feeling and communicating feeling, of understanding and arousing emotion; lyrical inspiration, or the power of spontaneous singing-these are among the many elements that go to make up poetry. These, no doubt, are alluded to by Mr. Arnold in the clause referring to "poetic beauty and poetic truth." But it is needful to insist upon them, after having dwelt so long upon the matter and the moral tone of poetry. No sane critic can deny that the possession of one or more of these qualities in any very eminent degree will save a poet from the neglect to which moral revolt or indifference might otherwise condemn him. Ariosto's vulgarity of feeling, Shelley's crude and discordant opinions,

summate form, are consigned to poetical perdition by vulgarity, perversity, obliquity of vision. But the carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets and rondeaux, the seeking after sound or color without heed for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure. The absolute neglect which has fallen on the melodious Italian sonnet-writers of the sixteenth century is due to their cult of art for art's sake, and their indifference to the realities of life. If we ask why Machiavelli's Mandragora is inferior to Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, in spite of its profound knowledge of human nature, its brilliant wit, its irresistible humor, its biting satire, and its incomparably closer workmanship, we can only answer that Shakespeare's conception of life was healthy, natural, exhilarating, while Machiavelli's, without displaying the earnestness of revolt, was artificial, morbid, and depressing. The sympathies which every great work of art stimulates tend in the case of Shakespeare's play to foster, in the case of Machiavelli's to stunt, the all-essential elements of social happiness and vigor. In point of form, the Mandragora has better right to be a classic comedy than the Merry Wives of Windsor. But the application of ideas to life in it is so unsound and so perverse that commonsense rejects it: we tire of living in so false a world.

Without multiplying instances, it can be affirmed, with no dread of opposition, that all art, to be truly great art, to be permanent and fresh and satisfying through a hundred generations, to yield the bread and wine of daily sustenance to men and women in successive ages, must be moralized-must be in harmony with those principles of conduct, that tone of feeling, which it is the self-preservative instinct of civilized humanity to strengthen. This does not mean that the artist should be consciously didactic or obtrusively ethical. The objects of ethics and of art are distinct. The one analyzes and instructs, the other embodies and delights. But since all the arts give form to thought and feeling, it follows that the greatest art is that which includes in its synthesis the fullest complex of thoughts and feelings. The more complete the poet's grasp of human nature as a whole, the more com

plete his presentation of life in organized complexity, the greater he will be. Now the whole struggle of the human race from barbarism to civilization is one continuous effort to maintain and to extend its moral dignity. It is by the conservation and alimentation of moral qualities that we advance. The organization of our faculties into a perfect whole is moral harmony. Therefore artists who aspire to greatness can neither be adverse nor indifferent to ethics. In each case they proclaim their own inadequacy to the subject-matter of their art-humanity. In each case they present a maimed and partial portrait of their hero-man. In each case they must submit, however exquisite their style, however acute their insight, to be excluded from the supreme company of the immortals. We need do no more than name the chiefs of European poetry

Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Molière-in order to recognize the fact that they owe their superiority to the completeness of their representation, to their firm grasp upon the harmony of human faculties in large morality. It is this which makes classical and humane literature convertible terms. It is this which has led all classes and ages of men back and back to these great poets as to their familiar friends and teachers," the everlasting solace of mankind."

While substantially agreeing with Mr. Arnold, it may be possible to take exception to the form of his definition. He lays too great stress, perhaps, on the phrases, application of ideas, and criticism. The first might be qualified as misleading, because it seems to attribute an ulterior purpose to the poet; the second as tending to confound two separate faculties, the creative and the judicial. Plato's conception of poetry as an inspiration, a divine instinct, may be nearer to the truth. The application of ideas should not be too conscious, else the poet sinks into the preacher. The criticism of life should not be too much his object, else the poet might as well have written essays. What is wanted is that, however spontaneous his utterance may be, however he may aim at only beauty in his work, or "sing but as the linnet sings," his message should be adequate to healthy and mature human