If our analysis of their education, government, and religions has been logical, the extreme literalness, conservatism, and slowness of the Chinese mind has been proved. Whether it can ever be really reformed is a serious question, whose complex answer can be given à priori only by those who, like Buckle, have made a thorough study of race-differences and the effect of geographical position on history. But arguing from the past, very obviously no complete or lasting change can be expected in the mental condition of China, unless the best minds of all classes of society are subjected to some extraordinary and constant friction. That friction Western trade and science can supply. The fine ports, the splendid rivers, the fertile territories, the art ideas, the industrial habits of the people, all invite our capital, railroads, steamboats and telegraphs, etc., as soon as the demonstration has been made beyond peradventure that capital will not be disturbed. Two of the Northern districts alone are said to contain thousands of square miles of coal deposits. Notwithstanding the deceit of the Chinese people in private life, they usually have fulfilled their business contracts honorably and promptly. They have remarkable imitative ability, and a hereditary culture which may some day prove widely useful.

A hundred other problems remain to be solved in the presence of these ancients of the earth, every one of which will tend to make them lean more heavily upon the arms which are able and should help to support them until they can walk in the new path by themselves. Of science they know next to nothing. Of medicine they are profoundly ignorant. Their defiance of sanitary laws is shocking in the highest degree. Here are object-lessons which can be taught before their eyes; which they can learn first in a mechanical way; the solution of which will add to their individual comfort; and for permission to exercise these functions foreigners need not apply to the government. Mountains of superstition, conceit, and prejudice remain to be removed. The stable is Augean, for new and puzzling antagonisms against change arise with every real advance in China. There has lately been some ground for belief that the Chinese government was becoming liberalized enough to assist from its being willing to allow its difficulties with

Japan and Russia to be settled by international arbitration and the payment of monetary indemnities. It should be remembered that, contrary to the history of Europe, peace has been the normal state of China. During the past century never once have her three hundred millions borne their standard into foreign soil, Burmah, Siam, or Corea, though the control of new colonies would probably have been an easy matter. The establishment of a commission to superintend the education of boys in this country was likewise a good sign; but the unfavorable criticisms of one illiberal inspector insured their prompt recall.

The failure of the Taiping rebellion, though desperately persisted in when the central government was weakened by powerful foreign adversaries, has shown how hazardous would be reliance on a change of dynasties brought about by fraternal warfare. There remains the alternative that China will be reconquered by some European power; ever since she has equipped and reorganized her army according to European methods, the war-clouds have seemed to lie low over that portion of Asia, as if China longed once more to humble the "foreign-devils." With any first-class power, such as France or Russia, the result can scarcely be doubtful. As Colonel Peter Gordon, the leader of the "ever-victorious" government force in the Taiping Rebellion, lately told the Chinese government, "Potentially you are perhaps invincible, but the outcome of a premature war will show you to be vulnerable at a thousand points." No intelligent nation would be eager to repeat England's experiment with India. The management of China would prove to be that of a stupendous white elephant. The contingency that China might peacefully split into two or three separate empires is not worth considering at present.

Obviously, then, we have seen the re-modeling of China by peaceful means must be a painfully slow and uncertain process. External commerce has proved to be the only quickening wedge in splitting off the old shell of conceit and ignorance, and two obstinately contested and bloody wars were necessary to drive that wedge home. Whether new wars would prove equally effective in demonstrating the character and inaugurating the reforms of our civilization is extremely doubtful.

Like a

way." "Clouds and darkness are round about His throne." There is a difference, and even the finite may grasp it, between Truth and Beauty. This is not the voice even of a strong soul. In a much larger sense is it true that what we call beautiful and what we call unlovely are parts alike of the infinite whole, and only appear as they thus do to us because of the standpoint from which we view them, or because refracted by the medial atmosphere of desire or of aversion through which we view them. And yet, inadequate as we feel these beautiful things he says to be, we instinctively like Mr. Sidney Lanier better for having said them, we instinctively wish they were the whole truth. So prone are we, poor faltering human souls, to sympathize with weakness.

If, then, we read these lectures soothed in the gratification of our own desires, we read them with intensest delight. The very desultoriness is a charm. The exquisite sense of appreciation of fitness allures us. We are flattered with the thought that we also could have discovered these beautiful things. We dwell in the land of Beulah-till we stop to think. "But," says one of our later writers, "To appreciate is to analyze, to analyze is to fail in belief; to fail in belief is to fail in love." Even, however, with this risk before us we will look for a moment at some of the simpler problems involved in this study of the relations of Art and Life, and we will try to avoid the two most prominent defects in the work before us. First its lack of persistent virility, which leads to contentment with confusion and indistinctness of thought-and second the flippant seriousness-for I know no better characterization-of the style.

The questions are: is there a tendency in Literature toward the growth of the Personal or toward the predominating influ ence of the Principle. Can Truth be unlovely? Shall Art have a moral purpose? What is the proper function of the immoral? The questions appear to lie at the threshold of the inquiry. But back of all is the greater question which is as old as history and as new as yesterday,-the conflict of the actual with the Ideal. Is it true that the unseen or dimly seen verity inspires consciously or unconsciously the real artist, and that he may work on unmindful of the immediate result to his audience,

provided only he be not unmindful of the heavenly vision? Or shall he be filled with sense of his mission to the immediate and the present listener, and with moral purpose dominant shall he sort out such truths as are elevating, as are inspiring, and conclude that the others are an inferior sort of truths unworthy of attention? In other words must he consider the actual world about him, its cravings, its helplessnesses, its wearinesses, and must he adapt his utterance to its sense of beauty, its sense of form, its sense of rightness if you will? Or may he be led on of the kindly light picturing the actual without fear and without trembling, but picturing it suffused, so far as it seems to him to be suffused, with the ideal, and be utterly regardless of the immediate result.

Let us lead up to the questions through a few generalizations. Literature is the language painting of events, or of emotions, or of principles. Its subject determines its character as the narrative, or the novel, or the sermon, but its atmosphere rather than its form determines its classification, as into prose or poetry. And here we turn back again to Mr. Lanier. He considers forms as transitory, but he apotheosizes form. "The relation," says he, "of prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the formal; it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms." And yet we need go no further than to his own quotations to prove that neither form nor forms makes poetry to him distinct from prose. Whatever the form, if it exhale the subtle quality which by instinct, or reason, or education, we have learned to cognize as the poetic content, it is poetry to him, and it is poetry to us. If it have it not, it is prose.

--

For example, and a familiar one-here are some lines from one of the Ingoldsby Legends.

"The Lady Jane was tall and slim,

The Lady Jane was fair.

And Sir Thomas, her lord, was stout of limb,
But his cough was short, and his eyes were dim,
And he wore green specs, with a tortoise shell rim,
And his hat was remarkably broad in the brim,
And she was uncommonly fond of him,

And they were a loving pair."

Now these are faultless verses. They are rythmic, they are electric. We sing to them, dance to them. But to most of us

they are simply musical, metrical, narrative prose. Compare them with this from the "New Day" by Richard Watson Gilder.

"There was a field green and fragrant with grass and flowers, and flooded with light from the sun, and the air of it throbbed with the songs of birds.

"It was yet morning when a great darkness came and fire followed lightning over the face of it, and the singing birds fell dead upon the blackened grass. The thunder and the flame passed, but it was still dark-till a ray of light touched the field's edge and grew little by little. Then one who listened heard not the song of birds again, but the flutter of broken wings."

This is neither metrical nor conventional in form, but it is pure poetry. Examples could be multiplied. Consider the Psalms of David; consider the book of Job. You cannot translate them into the unpoetical. The essence of the poetical is in its atmosphere, its inner content, and not in its form or forms.

In like manner, in any work of value the least potent quality is commonly its visible influence. The enduring is not that which appears upon the surface. Mr. Lanier appears always to preach from the visible. He shrinks, with a timidity immensely entertaining, from the coarseness of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. He tells with his own quaint grace of manner and not without a certain limited truthfulness; "I protest that I can read none of these books without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable; in other words they play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavor to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument."

Now what gives this shuddering to Mr. Lanier. He thinks it is the moral degradation. He says of Smollett's work, "It professed to show man exactly as he is and the final result was such a portrayal as must make any man sit down before the picture in a miserable deep of contempt for himself and his fellows." But how comes it that he says of George Eliot, for whom,--and with reason, he has no words insistant enough to voice his admiration. "George Eliot's book is so sharp a