My whole scheme would be a return to the practice of the Primitive Church, when priests were only allowed on sufferance inside abbeys at all. The Low Church party need not be considered, because they can have no sentiment about what they regard as relics of superstition and Broad Churchmen could hardly complain at the logical development of their own principle. The Nonconformists, the backbone of the nation, could not be otherwise than grateful. The decision about admitting busts, statues, or bodies into the national and sacred 'musee des morts' (as the anti-clerical French might call it under the new constitution) would rest with the Home Secretary. This would be an added interest to the duties of a painstaking official, forming pleasant interludes between considering the remission of sentences on popular criminals: it would relieve the Dean and Chapter at all events from grave responsibility. The Home Secretary would always be called the Abbot of Westminster. How picturesque at the formation of a new Cabinet—'Home Secretary and Abbot of Westminster, the Right Hon. Mr. So-and-So.' The first duty of the Abbot will be to appoint a Royal Commission to consider the removal of hideous monuments which disfigure the edifice: nothing prior to 1700 coming under its consideration. A small tablet would recall what has been taken away. Herbert Spencer's claim to a statue would be duly considered, and, I hope, by a unanimous vote some of the other glaring gaps would be filled up. If the Abbey is full of obscurities, very dim religious lights, many of the illustrious names in our literature have been omitted: Byron, Shelley, Keats—to mention only these. There is no monument to Chatterton, one of the more powerful influences in the romantic movement, nor to William Blake, whose boyish inspiration was actually nourished amid that 'Gothic supineness,' as Mr. MacColl has finely said of him. Of all our poets and painters Blake surely deserves a monument in the grey church which became to him what St. Mary Redcliffe was to Chatterton. A window adapted from the book of Job (with the marvellous design of the Morning Stars) was, I am told, actually offered to, and rejected by, the late Dean. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the wonderful movement of which he was the dynamic force there should also be a worthy memorial; to Water Pater, the superb aside of English prose; to Cardinal Manning, the Ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century; and Professor Huxley, that master of dialectics.

A young actor of my acquaintance, who bore the honoured name of Siddons, was invited to take part in the funeral service of the late Sir Henry Irving. His step-father was connected by marriage with the great actress, and he was very proud of his physical resemblance to her portrait by Reynolds. He had played with great success the part of Fortinbras in the provinces, and Mr. Alexander has assured me that he was the ideal impersonator of Rosencrantz. It was an open secret that he had refused Mr. Arthur Bourchier's offer of that role in a proposed revival of Hamlet at the Garrick. Since the burial of Sir Henry Irving in the Abbey, he has never been seen: though I saw him myself in the funeral cortege. All his friends remember the curious exaltation in his manner a few days before the ceremony, and I cannot help thinking that in a moment of enthusiasm, realising that this was his only chance of burial in the Abbey, he took advantage of the bowed unobservant heads during the prayer of Committal and crept beneath the pall into the great actor's tomb. What his feelings were at the time, or afterwards when the vault was bricked up, would require the introspective pen of Mr. Henry James and the curious imagination of Mr. H. G. Wells to describe. I have been assured by the vergers that mysterious sounds were heard for some days after this historical occasion. Distressed by the loss of my friend, I applied to the Dean of Westminster and finally to Scotland Yard. I need not say that I was met with sacerdotal indifference on the one hand and with callous officialism on the other. I hope that under the Royal Commission which I have appointed the mystery will be cleared up. Not that I begrudge poor Siddons a niche with Garrick and Irving.

(1906.)

To PROFESSOR JAMES MAYOR, Toronto University.



THE ELETHIAN MUSE.

After chaperoning into Fleet Street the eleventh Muse, the rather Batavian lady who is not to be found in that Greek peerage, Lempriere's Dictionary, an obliging correspondent from Edinburgh (an eminent writer to the Signet in our northern Thebes) inquired if there were any more muses who had escaped the students of comparative mythology. It is in response to his letter that I now present, as Mr. Charles Frohman would say, the thirteenth, the Elethian Muse.

Yet I can fancy people asking, Where is the twelfth, and over what art or science does she preside? According to Apollodorus (in a recently recovered fragment from Oxyrynchus), Jupiter, suffering from the chronic headaches consequent on his acrimonious conversations with Athena, decided to consult Vulcan, AEsculapius having come to be regarded as a quack. Mulciber (as we must now call him, having used the name Vulcan once), suggested an extraordinary remedy, one of the earliest records of a homoeopathic expedient. He prescribed that the king of gods and men should keep his ambrosial tongue in the side of his cheek for half an hour three times a day. The operation produced violent retching in the Capitoline stomach. And on the ninth day, from his mouth, quite unarmed, sprang the twelfth muse. The other goddesses were very disgusted; and even the gods declined to have any communication with the new arrival. Apollo, however, was more tolerant, and offered her an asylum on the top shelf of the celestial library. Ever afterwards Musagetes used to be heard laughing immoderately, even for a librarian to the then House of Lords. Jupiter, incensed at this irregularity, paid him a surprise visit one day in order to discover the cause. He stayed, however, quite a long time; and the other deities soon contracted the habit of taking their nectar into the library. With the decline of manners, the twelfth muse began to be invited to dessert, after Juno and the more reputable goddesses had retired. To cut a long story short, when Pan died, in the Olympian sense very shortly afterwards, all the gods, as we know, took refuge on earth. Jupiter retired to Iceland, Aphrodite to Germany, Apollo to Picardy, but the twelfth muse wandered all over Europe, and found that she was really more appreciated than her sisters. The castle, the abbey, the inn, the lone ale-house on the Berkshire moors, all made her welcome. Finally she settled in Ireland, where, according to a protestant libel, she took the black veil in a nunnery.

She is older than the chestnuts of Vallombrosa. Perhaps of all the ancient goddesses time has chilled her least. Her unfathomable smile wears a touch of something sinister in it, but she has a new meaning for every generation. And yet for Aretino there was some further magic of crimson on her lips and cheeks, lost for us. She is a solecism for the convalescent, and has given consolation to the brave. She has been a diver in rather deep seas and a climber in somewhat steep places. Her censers are the smoking-rooms of clubs; and her presence-lamps are schoolboys' lanterns. Though held the friend of liars and brutes, she has lived on the indelicacies of kings, and has made even pontiffs laugh. Her mysteries are told in the night-time, and in low whispers to the garish day. She lingers over the stable-yard (no doubt called mews for that reason). Her costly breviaries, embellished with strange illuminations, are prohibited under Lord Campbell's Act. Stars mark the places where she has been. Sometimes a scholar's fallacy, a sworn foe to Dr. Bowdler, she is Notre Dame de Milet, our Lady of Limerick.

* * * * *

But it is of her sister I would speak, the thirteenth sister, who was created to keep the eleventh in countenance. She presides over the absurdities of prose. She is responsible for the stylistic flights of Pegasus when, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the Hon. Stephen Coleridge, his bearing-rein has been abolished, and he kicks over the traces.

It was the Elethian Muse who inspired that Oxford undergraduate's peroration to his essay on the Characteristics of St. John's Gospel—

'Furthermore, we may add that St. John's Gospel is characterised by a tone of fervent piety which is totally wanting in those of the other Evangelists'—

and she hovered over the journalist who, writing for a paper which we need not name, referred to Bacchus as

'that deity whose identity in Greek and Roman mythology is inseparably connected with the over-indulgence of intoxicating liquors.'

There are prose beauties, Elethian jewels, hidden away in Baedeker's mines of pregnant information and barren fact. I know it is fashionable to sneer at Baedeker, especially when you are writing little rhapsodies about remoter parts of Italy, where you have found his knowledge indispensable, if exiguous. You must always kick away the ladder when you arrive at literary distinction. I, who am still climbing and still clinging, can afford to be more generous. Let me, therefore, crown Baedeker with an essayist's parsley, or an academic laurel, ere I too become selfish, forgetful, egoistical, and famous.

In Southern France, 1891 edition, p. 137, you find—

To the Pic de Nere, 3.75 hrs. from Luz, there and back 6.5 hrs.; a delightful excursion, which can be made on horseback part of the way: guide 12, horse 10 fr.; adders abound.

For synthetic prose you will have to go to Tacitus to find the equal of that passage. No more is heard of the excursion. 'We leave Luz by the Barege road,' the text goes on to say. Reflections and picturesque word- painting are left for Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Murray.

In Southern Italy, Baedeker yields to softer and more Virgilian influences. The purple patches are longer and more frequent. On page 99 we learn not only how to get to Baiae, but that

Luxury and profligacy, however, soon took up their abode at Baiae, and the desolate ruins, which now alone encounter the eye, point the usual moral!

And from the preface to the same guide we obtain this remarkable advice:—

The traveller should adopt the Neapolitan custom of rejecting fish that are not quite fresh.

But it is certain educational works, popular in my childhood, that have yielded the more exotic Elethian blossoms for my Anthology. There are passages I would not willingly let die. In one of these books general knowledge was imparted after the manner of Magnall: 'What is the world? The earth on which we live.' 'Who was Raphael?' 'How is rice made?' After such desultory interrogatives, without any warning, came Question 15: 'Give the character of Prince Potemki':—

Sordidly mean, ostentatiously prodigal, filthily intemperate and affectedly refined. Disgustingly licentious and extravagantly superstitious, a brute in appetite, vigorous though vacillating in action.

Until I went to the University, a great many years afterwards, I never learnt who Potemki was. At the age of seven he stood to me for what 'Timberio' still is for Capriote children. My teacher obviously did not know. She always evaded my inquiries by saying, 'You will know when you are older, darling.' Suspecting her ignorance, I became pertinacious. 'When I am as old as you?' was my ungallant rejoinder. I had to write the character out a hundred times. Then one Christmas Day I ventured to ask my father, who said I would find out about him in Gibbon. But I knew he was not speaking the truth, because he laughed in a nervous, peculiar way, and added that since I was so fond of history I must go to Oxford when I was older. I loathed history, and inwardly resolved that Cambridge should be my University. My mother admitted entire ignorance of Potemki's identity; and on my sketching his character (for I was proud of the knowledge), said he was obviously a 'horrid' man. His personality shadowed my childhood with a deadly fascination, which has not entirely worn away; producing the same sort of effect on me as an imaginary portrait by Pater.

In a semi-geographical work called Near Home; or, Europe Described, published by Hatchards in the fifties (though my friend, Mr. Arthur Humphreys, denies all knowledge of it), I can recall many stereos of dialectic cast in a Socratic mould:—

Q. What is the religion of the Italians? A. They are Roman Catholics.

Q. What do the Roman Catholics worship? A. Idols and a piece of bread.

Q. Would not God be very angry if He knew the Italians worshipped idols and a piece of bread? A. God IS very angry.

Mr. Augustine Birrell, if still interested in educational phenomena, will not be surprised to learn that when I reached to man's estate I 'embraced the errors of Rome,' as my historical manual would have phrased it.

I pity the child who did not learn universal history from Collier. How tame are the periods of Lord Acton, the Rev. William Hunt, Froude, Freeman, Oman, Round, even Macaulay, and little Arthur, beside the rich Elethian periods of William Francis Collier. Not Berenson, not Byron, not Beerbohm, have given us such a picture of Venice as Collier in describing the Council of Ten:—

The ten were terrible; but still more terrible were the three inquisitors—two black, one red—appointed in 1454. Deep mystery hung over the three. They were elected by the ten; none else knew their names. Their great work was to kill; and no man—doge, councillor, or inquisitor—was beyond their reach. Secretly they pronounced a doom; and ere long the stiletto or the poison cup had done its work, or the dark waters of the lagoon had closed over a life. The spy was everywhere. No man dared to speak out, for his most intimate companions might be on the watch to betray him. Bronze vases, shaped like a lion's mouth, gaped at the corner of every square to receive the names of suspected persons. Gloom and suspicion haunted gondola and hearth!!

It is owing to Collier that I know at least one fact about the Goths who took Rome, 'having reduced the citizens to feed on mice and nettles, A.D. 546,' a diet to which many of the hotel proprietors in the imperial city still treat their clients.

But let Bellows' Dictionary, a friend and instructor of riper years, close my list of great examples and my theme. The criticism is apposite to myself, and its only oddity—its Elethian quality, if I may say so—is its presence in that marvellous miniature whose ingenious author you would never suspect could have found room for such portentous observations in the small duodecimo to which he confined himself:—

Unaffected language is the inseparable accompaniment of natural refinement; but that affectation which would make up for paucity of thought by overstrained expression is a mark of vulgarity from which no accident of social position can redeem those who are guilty of it.

To MORE ADEY, ESQ.



THERE IS NO DECAY.

A Lecture delivered in the Old Bluecoat School, Liverpool, on February 12th, 1908.

'In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work; and in every age that question is waste of time and speech. To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age.'—SWINBURNE.

Before the invention of printing, or let me say before the cheapening of printing, the lecturer was in a more fortunate position than he is to- day; because, if a learned man, he was able to give his audience certain pieces of information which he could be fairly sure some of his listeners had never heard before. The arrival in town or city of Abelard, Paracelsus, or Erasmus, to take the first instances occurring to me, must have been a great event, the importance of which we can scarcely appreciate at the present day. It must have excited our forefathers, at least as much as the arrival of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in any large city, excites I imagine, all of us to-day. But multiplication of books has really rendered lecturers, as instructors, mere intellectual Othellos; their occupation is gone; the erudition of the ages is now within reach of all; though educational books were fairly expensive within living memory. You owe, therefore, a debt of gratitude to the Times and the Daily Mail for bringing Encyclopaedias of all kinds into the range of the shallowest purse and in contact with the shallowest heads in the community.

But in case your learned professors have not contributed all their hidden lore and scholarship to the cheap Encyclopaedias, and still allow their learning to leak out at lectures, you may have come expecting instruction from me on some neglected subject. If that is so, I must confess myself at once an impostor. I have no information to give you. I assume your erudition to compensate for my own lack of it. There are no facts which I might bring before you that you cannot find stated more clearly in valuable manuals or works of reference, if you have not mastered them already. There is no scientific or philosophic theory which I might propound that you could not hear with greater benefit from others.

Briefly, I have no orange up my sleeve.

Let there be no deception or disappointment. I want you to play with an idea as children play at ball—not football—but the old game of catch. And out of this discussion, for I trust that you will all differ, if not with me, at least with each other, trains of thought may be quickened; mental grassland ploughed up; hidden perspectives unveiled. Above all, I would stimulate you to an appreciation of your contemporaries and of contemporary literature, contemporary drama, and contemporary art.

Every few years distinguished men lift their voices, and tell us that all is over, decay has begun. The obscure and the anonymous echo the sentiment in the London Press. With the fall of any Government its supporters prophesy the rapid decomposition of the Empire; in the pulpit eloquent preachers of every sect and communion, thundering against the vices of Society, declare that Society is breaking up. Of course, not being in Society, I am hardly in a position to judge; and the vices I know only at second-hand—from the preachers. Yet I see no outward signs of decay in Society; it dresses quite as well, in some ways better than, it did. Society eats as much, judging from the size and number of new restaurants; its patronises as usual the silliest plays in London, and buys in larger quantities than ever the idiotic novels provided for it. Have you ever been to a bazaar in aid of Our Dumb Friends' League? Well, you see Society there, I can tell you; it is not dumb. And the conversation sounds no less vapid and no less brilliant than we are told it was in the eighteenth century; the dresses and faces are quite as pretty. But much as I should like to discuss the decay of English Society and the English nation, I feel that such lofty themes are beyond my reach. I am concerned only with the so-called decay of humbler things, the abstract manifestations of the human intellect, the Arts and Sciences. And lest, weary at the end of my discourse, you forget the argument or miss it, let me state at once what I wish to suggest, nay, what I wish to assert, there is no such thing as decay. Decay is an intellectual Mrs. Harris, a highly useful entity wherewith the journalistic Gamps try to frighten Betsy Prig. Of course an obvious objection to my assertion is the truism that everything has a life; and that towards the end of that natural life we are correct in speaking of approaching decay. With physical phenomena, however, I am not dealing, though I may say, by the way, that there are many examples of human intellect maturing in middle life or extreme old age. William Blake's masterpiece, the illustrations to the Book of Job, were executed when he was sixty-eight, a few years before his death. The late Lord Kelvin is an example of an unimpaired intellect. Still, it must be admitted that while nations may be destroyed by conquest, or by conquering too much and becoming absorbed by the conquered, and that ancient buildings may be pulled down or restored, so, too, conventions in literature and schools of art have been brought to an end by war, plague, or death—ostensibly brought to an end. But it is an error to suppose that art or literature, because their development was artificially arrested, were in a state of decay.

The favourite object-lesson of our childhood was the Roman Empire. 'Here's richness,' as Mr. Squeers said, here was decline, and Gibbon wrote his prose epic from that point of view. I hardly dare to differ with the greatest of English historians, but if we approach his work in the scientific spirit with which we should always regard history, we shall find that Gibbon draws false deductions from the undisputed facts, the unchallenged assertions of his history. Commencing with the Roman Empire almost in its cradle, he sees in every twist of the infant limbs prognostications of premature decline in a dispensation which by his own computation lasted over fourteen hundred years. It is safe enough to prophesy about the past. Everything I admit has a life, but I do not consider old age decay any more than I think exuberant youth immature childhood; death may be only arrested development and life itself an exhausted convention. Have you ever tried to count the number of reasons Gibbon gives (each one is a principal reason) for the cause of Roman decline? His philosophy reminds me of Flaubert's hero, who observed that if Napoleon had been content to remain a simple soldier in the barracks at Marseilles, he might still be on the throne of France. If we really accept Gibbon's view of history, I am not surprised that any one should be nervous about the British Empire. The great intellectual idea of the Roman dominion, arrested indeed by barbarian invasion, philosophically never decayed. Some of it was embalmed in Byzantium—particularly its artistic and literary sides; its religious forces were absorbed by the Roman Church, as Hobbes pointed out in a very wonderful passage; its humanism and polity became the common property of the European nations of to-day. Gibbon's work should have been called 'The Rise and Progress of Greco-Roman Civilisation.' That is not such a good title, but it would have been more accurate. And if you compare critically the history of any manifestation of the human intellect, religion, literature, painting, architecture, or science, you will find that the development of one expressive force has been momentarily arrested while some other manifestation is asserting itself synchronously with the supposed decay in a manifestation whose particular history you are studying. Always regard the deductions of the historian with the same scepticism that you regard the deductions of fiscal politicians.

Every one knows the charming books by writers more learned than I can pretend to be, where the history of Italian art is traced from Giotto downwards; the story of Giotto and the little lamb, now, alas! entirely exploded; of Cimabue's Madonna being carried about in processions, and now discovered to have been painted by some one else! Then on to Massaccio through the delightful fifteenth century until you see in the text-book in large print, like the flashes of harbour lights after a bad Channel crossing, RAPHAEL, MICHAEL ANGELO, DA VINCI. But when you come to the seventeenth century, Guido Reni, the Carracci, and other painters (for the present moment out of fashion), painters whose work fetches little at Christie's, the art critic and historian begin to snivel about decay; not only of Italian art, but of the Italian peninsula; and their sobs will hardly ever allow them to get as far as Longhi, Piazetta, and Tiepolo, those great masters of the eighteenth century.

But we know, painters certainly must know if they look at old masters at all, that Tiepolo, if he was the last of the old masters, was also the first of the moderns; it was his painting in Spain which influenced Goya, and Goya is not only a deceased Spanish master, he is a European master of to-day. You can trace his influence through all the great French figure-painters of the nineteenth century down to those of the New English Art Club, though they may not have actually known they were under his influence. Painting commences with a childish naturalism, such as you see on the walls of pre-historic caves; that is why savages always prefer photographs to any work of art, and why photographers are always so savage about works of art. Gradually this childish naturalism develops into decoration; it becomes stylistic. The decoration becomes perfected and sterile; then there arises a more sophisticated generation, longing for naturalism, for pictorial vraisemblance, without the childishness of the cave pictures. And their new art develops at the expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile. What is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development. The exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debasement of Greco-Roman art. It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce interfered. The intensely artificial painting of France, to which Diderot objected so much, had become perfect and sterile. Then (happily or unhappily, in whichever direction your tastes lie) the French Revolution, by a pathetic misunderstanding of classical ideals, paved the way for the naturalism of the misnamed Romantic school. We were told, a short time ago, that Sienese painting anticipated by a few years the Florentine manifestations of Cimabue and Giotto, but Mr. Berenson has pointed out that Sienese art is not the beginning but the end of an exquisite convention, the quintessence of Byzantium. In the Roscoe collection at Liverpool you have one of the most superb and precious examples of this delicate, impeccable and decadent art: 'Christ found in the Temple,' by Simone di Martini.

In Egyptian art, again, compare the pure naturalism of the wonderful Egyptian scribe of the Louvre, belonging, I am told, to the fifth or sixth dynasty, with the hieratic and conventional art of the twelfth dynasty; while in the eighteenth dynasty you get a reversion to realism, which critics have the audacity to call a 'revival of art.' But you might just as well call it decayed, as indeed they do call some of the most magnificent Ptolemaean remains, simply because they happen to belong to a certain date which, by Egyptian reckoning, may be regarded as very recent. Just now we very foolishly talk in accents of scorn about the early Victorian art, of which I venture to remind you Turner was not the least ornament. Of course commercial and political events often interrupt the gestation of the arts, or break our idols in pieces. Another generation picks up the fragments and puts them together in the wrong way, and that is why it is so confusing and interesting; but there is no reason to be depressed about it. Only iconoclasm need annoy us. In histories of English literature too often you find the same attitude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes. Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debasement, and with Tennyson the young student is given to understand that English literature ceased altogether. But perhaps there are more modern text-books where the outlook is less gloomy. If, instead of reading the history of literature, you read the literature itself, you will find plenty of instances of writers at the most brilliant periods complaining of decay.

George Putman, in the Art of English Poesy, published in 1589, when English poetry was starting on a particularly glorious period, says, 'In these days all poets and poesy are despised, they are subject to scorn and derision,' and 'this proceeds through the barbarous ignorance of the time—in other ages it was not so.' Then Jonson, in his 'Discoveries,' lamenting the decline of literature, says, 'It is the disease of the age, and no wonder if the world, growing old, begins to be infirm.' There are hundreds of others which will immediately occur to you, from Chaucer to Tennyson, though Pope made noble protests on behalf of his contemporaries. You have only got to compare these lachrymose observations with the summary of the year's literature in any newspaper—'literary output' is the detestable expression always used—and you will find the same note of depression. 'The year has not produced a single masterpiece. Glad as we have been to welcome Mr. Blank's verse, "Larkspurs" cannot be compared with his first delicious volume, "Tealeaves," published thirty years ago.' Then turn to the review in the same paper of 'Tealeaves' thirty years ago. 'Coarse animalism draped in the most seductive hues of art and romance, we will not analyse these poems, we will not even pretend to give the reasons on which our opinion is based.' Or read the incisive 'Musings without Method,' in Blackwood's Magazine, on contemporary literature and contemporary things generally.

Again, every painter is told that his work is not as good as last year, and that we have no one like Titian or Velasquez. The Royal Academy is always said to be worse than usual. I have known the summer exhibitions at Burlington House for twenty years. Let me assure you throughout that period they have always been quite as bad as they are now. But we do not want painters like Titian or Velasquez; we want something else. If painters were like Titian or Velasquez they would not be artists at all. When Velasquez went to Rome he was told he ought to imitate Raphael; had he done so should we regard him as the greatest painter in the world? If Rossetti had merely been another Fra Angelico or one of the early artists from whom he derived such noble inspiration, should we regard him as we do, as even the fierce young modern art student does, as one of the greatest figures in English art of the nineteenth century? In the latter part of that century I think he is the greatest force in English painting. I would reserve for him the largest print in my manual of English art. But have we declined since the death of Rossetti? On the contrary, I think we have advanced and are advancing. You must not think I am depreciating the past. The past is one of my witnesses. The past was very like our present; it nearly always depreciated itself intellectually and materially.

We all of us think of Athens in the fifth century as a golden period of great men, when every genius was appreciated, but you know that they put Pheidias in prison. And take the instance of Euripides. The majority of his countrymen said he was nothing to the late Aeschylus. He was chiefly appreciated by foreigners, as you will remember if you are able to read 'Balaustion's Adventure' (so much more difficult than Euripides in the original Greek). Listen to what Professor Murray says:—

His contemporary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured them with personal problems; as malignant, because he made them see truths they wished not to see; as blasphemous and foul-minded, because he made demands on their religious and spiritual natures which they could neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical—Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They only knew that he made them angry and that they could not help listening to him.

Does not that remind you a little of what was said all over England of Mr. Bernard Shaw? Of what is still said about him in many London houses to-day? If some one praises him, the majority of people will tell you that he is overrated. Does it not remind you of the reception which Ibsen's plays met when they were first produced here: when they gave an impetus to that new English drama which I understand is decaying, though it seems to me to be only beginning—the new English Drama of Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Housman, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and Mr. Masefield?

Every year the patient research of scholars by the consultation of original documents has caused us to readjust our historical perspective. Those villains of our childhood, Tiberius, Richard III., Mary Tudor, and others, have become respectable monarchs, almost model monarchs, if you compare them with the popular English view of the present King of the Belgians, the ex-Sultan of Turkey, and the present Czar of Russia. It is realised that contemporary journalism gave a somewhat twopence coloured impression of Kings and Queens, who were only creatures of their age, less admirable expressions of the individualism of their time. And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said by the historian or chronicler to be approaching termination or to be decaying, as he calls it, we should test carefully his data and his credentials. But, assuming he is right, there will always be found some compensating reaction in another sphere of intellectual activity which is in process of development; and through which, by some divine alchemy, providence, or nature, call it what you will, a new manifestation will be made to the world. The arts which we suppose to have perished, of which, indeed, we write affecting epitaphs, are merely hibernating; the intellect which is necessary for their production and nutrition is simply otherwise employed; while, of course, you must make allowances for the appreciations of posterity, change of fashion and taste. From the middle of the sixteenth century down to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, the Middle Ages were always thought of as the Dark Ages. Scarcely any one could appreciate either the pictorial art or architecture of mediaevalism; those who did so always had to apologise for their predilection. The wonders of Gothic art were furtively relished by a few antiquaries; and, at certain periods, by men like Beckford and Walpole, as agreeable drawing-room curiosities. The Romantic movement commenced by Chatterton enabled us to revise a limited and narrow view, based on insufficient information. It was John Ruskin, in England, who made us see what a splendid heritage the Middle Ages had bequeathed to us. Ruskin and his disciples then fell into the error of turning the tables on the Renaissance, and regarded everything that deviated from Gothic convention as debased; the whole art of the eighteenth century was anathema to them. The decadence began, according to Ruskin, with Raphael. Out of that ingenious error, or synchronous with it, began the brilliant movement of the Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the last century. And when the Pre-Raphaelites appeared, every one said the end of Art had arrived. Dickens openly attacked them; Thackeray ridiculed the new tendencies; every one, great and small, spoke of decay and decline. The French word Decadence had not crept into use. However, the weary Titan staggered on, as Matthew Arnold said, and when Mr. Whistler's art dawned on the horizon, Ruskin was among the first to see in it signs of decay. Except the poetry of Swinburne, never has any art met with such abuse. An example of the immortal painter now adorns the National Gallery of British painting, which is cared for—oh, irony of circumstances—by one of the first prophets of impressionism in this country, or, rather, let me say, one of the first English critics—Mr. D. S. MacColl.

But you will now ask how do I account for those periods when apparently the liberal arts are supposed not to have existed? I maintain they did exist, or that human intellect was otherwise employed. The excavations of prehistoric cities are evidences of my contention. Because things are destroyed we must not say they have decayed; if evidences are scarce, do not say they never existed. Our architecture, for example, took five hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. If church architecture was decaying, domestic architecture was improving. Architecture is, of course, the first and most important of all the arts, and when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture. The putting up of ugly buildings is merely a sign of growing stupidity, not of declining intellect or decaying taste. Jerry-building is the successful competition of dishonesty against competency. Do not imagine that because the good architects do not get commissions to put up useful or beautiful buildings they do not exist. The history of stupidity and the history of bad taste must one day engage our serious attention. There is no decay, alas, even in stupidity and bad taste.

The suddenness with which the literature of the sixteenth century developed in England has been explained, I know, by the Reformation. But you should remember the other critics of art, who ascribe the barrenness of our painting and the necessity of importing continental artists, also to the Reformation. I suggest that the intellectual capacity of the nation was directed towards literature, politics and religious controversy, rather than to art and religion. I cannot think there was any scarcity of the artistic germ in the English nation which had already expressed itself in the great Abbeys and Churches, such as Glastonbury, Tintern, Fountains, and York. And you must remember that the minor art of embroidery, the 'opus anglicanum' (which flourished for three centuries previous to the Reformation), was famous throughout Europe.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the big men, Swift, Pope, and Addison, having passed away, the Augustan age of English literature seemed exhausted. It was a time of intellectual dyspepsia; every one was much too fond of ruins; people built sham ruins on their estates. Rich men, who could afford the luxury, kept a dilapidated hermit in a cavern. Their chief pleasure on the continent was measuring ruins in the way described so amusingly by Goldsmith in The Citizen of the World. Though no century was more thoroughly pleased with itself, I might almost say smugly self-satisfied, the men of that century were always lamenting the decline of the age. The observations of Johnson and Goldsmith I need scarcely repeat. But here is one which may have escaped your notice. It is not a suggestion of decline, but an assertion of non-existence. Gray, the poet, the cultivated connoisseur, the Professor of History, writing in 1763 to Count Algarrotti, says: 'Why this nation has made no advances hitherto in painting and sculpture it is hard to say; the fact is undeniable, and we have the vanity to apologise for ourselves as Virgil did for the Romans:

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

'You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to see that art shall one day flourish in England. I too much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.' Yet in 1754 Chippendale had published his Cabinet Makers' Guide; and the next fifty years was to see the production of all that beautiful English furniture of which we are so justly proud, and which we forge with such surprising skill. It was the next fifty years that saw the production of the beautiful English pottery which we prize so highly, and it was the next hundred years that was to be the period of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Crome, Cotman, Alfred Stevens, and Turner, who died in 1851, just when the Pre-Raphaelites were supposed to be inaugurating the decay of that which Gray denied the existence, nearly one hundred years before.

Though the scope of my discussion is limited to literature and art, it would be paltry to confine our inquiries within limited horizons. Painting and architecture, alas, are not the whole of life; the fine arts are only the flowers of existence; they are useful as humanising elements; but they are not indispensable. That vague community among whom we arbitrarily place those with whom we disagree—the Philistines—get on very well without them. But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy. That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. Yet I suggest that, as was pointed out in the case of the fine arts, certain branches of the divine scholarship, if I may call it so, may be arrested temporarily in any development they may have reached. Let us take medicine. Medicine is primarily based upon the study of anatomy or structure—physiology—or the scheme of structure carried out in life; and upon botany and chemistry as representing the vegetable and mineral worlds where the remedies are sought. Anatomy soon reaches a finite position, when a sufficient number of careful dissections has been made; the other divisions used to look like promising endless development; but there is reason to suppose that they too, as far as medicine is concerned, have reached a sterile perfection.

The microscope is perfected up to a point which mechanicians think cannot be improved upon; so that those ultimate elements of physiology which depend upon the observation of minute structure are known to us. To put it crudely, we cannot discover any more germs, whose presence is hidden from us by mere minuteness, unless we can improve our machinery, and that, we are told, is an improbable event. I will not labour the point by applying it to botany, which is very obvious, or to chemistry, where it is not so clear. But it is clear that owing to a feeling that not much more is to be got from minute observation with the tools at our disposal, the brightest intellects and most inventive clairvoyant work are shunted into more imaginative channels. There are no men who guess so brilliantly as men of science, so that science, in that respect, has attained the dignity of Theology. I suppose that the startling theories propounded by Sir Oliver Lodge and others will be taken as evidence of the decay of science. But the human intellect, especially if it is scientific, cannot, I imagine, like actors, go on repeating or feigning the same emotion. It must leave for the moment as apparently completed one branch of knowledge to which it may return again after developing some less mature branch on which the attention of the most learned investigators is for a time wholly concentrated. The tree of knowledge is an evergreen, and in science, no more than in arts, is there any decay. When Darwin published his great Origin of Species which was hailed as a revelation, not only by scientific men, but by intelligent laymen, religious people became very much alarmed. They talked about the decay of faith, and ascribed any falling off in the offertories to the shillings spent on visiting the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens. Younger sons and less gifted members of clever families were no longer destined for Holy Orders; as we were descended from apes it would have seemed impious. They were sent to Cambridge to pursue a so-called scientific career, which was crowned by the usual aegrotat in botany instead of a pass in history. The falling off in candidates for Holy Orders seriously alarmed some of our Bishops; and Darwin—the gentle, delightful Darwin—became what the Pope had been to our ancestors. I need not point out how groundless these fears happily proved to be. The younger intellects of the country simply became more interested for the moment in the cross-breeding of squirrels, than in the internecine difficulties of the Protestant church on Apostolic succession, the number of candles on the altar, and the legality of incense. Now, I rejoice to say, there is a healthy revival of interest and a healthy difference of opinion on all these important religious questions. We must never pay serious attention to the alarmists who tell us that the churches and sects are seeing their last days. Macaulay has warned us never to be too sanguine about the Church of Rome. The moments of her greatest trials produced some of her greatest men—Ignatius Loyola, Philip Neri, and Francis Xavier. Do you think the Church is decaying because the congregations are banished from France, and the Concordat has come to an end? I tell you it will only stimulate her to further conquests; it is the beginning of a new life for the Catholic Church in France. If the Anglican Church were to be disestablished to-morrow, I would regard it as a Sandow exercise for the hardworking, splendid intellects of the Establishment. The Nonconformists—well, they never talk about their own decline; of all the divisions of Christianity they always seem to me heartily to enjoy persecution; and like myself, I never knew them to admit the word decadence into their vocabulary, at least about themselves. I hold them up to you as examples. Let us all be Nonconformists in that respect.

I do not ask you to adopt the habit against which Matthew Arnold directed one of his witty essays, the habit of expressing a too unctuous satisfaction with the age and time in which we are living. That was the intellectual error of the Eighteenth Century. There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry 'stinking fish,' and observe that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men. The fact that we know them personally sometimes undermines our faith; contemporary contempt for a great man is too often turned on the contemporaries. Do not let us look upon genius, as Schopenhauer accused some people of doing, 'as upon a hare which is good to eat when it has been killed and dressed up, but so long as it is alive only good to be shot at.' And if our intellectuals are not all Brobdingnagians, they are not all Liliputians. It seems to me ungenerous to make sweeping and deprecating assertions about our own time; it is also dangerous. The contemporary praise of unworthy work, ephemeral work—there is always plenty of that, we know—is forgotten; and (though it does not decay) perishes with the work it extolled. But unsound criticism and foolish abuse of great work is remembered to the confusion of the critics. Think of the reception accorded to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Rossetti, and Swinburne.

I remember that excellent third-rate writer, W. E. H. Lecky, making a speech at a dinner of the Authors' Society, in which he said that he was sorry to say there were no great writers alive, and no stylists to compare with those who had passed away. A few paces off him sat Walter Pater, George Meredith, and Mr. Austin Dobson. Tennyson, though not present at the banquet, was president of the Society, and Ruskin was still alive. When Swinburne's 'Atalanta in Calydon' appeared, another third-rate writer, James Russell Lowell, assured the world that its author was no poet, because there was no thought in the verse. Four years ago, at a provincial town in Italy, when one of the Italian ministers, at the opening of some public building, said that united Italy owed to the great English poet Swinburne a debt which it could never forget, the inhabitants cheered vociferously. This was no idle compliment; every one in Italy knows who Swinburne was. I will not hazard to guess the extent of the ovation which the names of Lowell and Lecky would receive, but I think the incident is a fair sign that English poetry has not decayed.

In the Daily Mail I saw once an interview with an inferior American black-and-white draughtsman at Berlin. He was asked his opinion about a splendid exhibition of old English pictures being held there, and took occasion to say 'what the pictures demonstrate is not that the English women of the eighteenth century were conspicuously lovely, but the artists who painted them possessed secrets of reproduction which posterity has failed to inherit.' I would like to reply 'Rot, rot, rot;' but that would imply a belief in decay. I suggest to the same critic that he should visit one of the 'International Exhibitions,' where he will see the pictures of Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon. Such a stupid view from an American is particularly amazing, because in Mr. John Singer Sargent, we (by we I mean America and ourselves) possess an artist who is certainly the peer of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and personally I should say a much greater painter than Reynolds. A hundred years hence, perhaps people at Berlin (the most critical and cultivated capital in the world) will be bending before the 'Three Daughters of Percy Wyndham,' the 'Duchess of Sutherland,' the 'Marlborough Family,' and many another masterpiece of Mr. Sargent and Mr. Charles Shannon. The same American critic says that our era of mediocrity will continue; so I am full of hope. Even the existence of America does not depress me: nor do I see in it a symptom of decay; if it produces much that is distasteful in the way of tinned meat, it gave us Mr. John Sargent and Mr. Henry James, and it took away from England Mr. Richard Le Gallienne.

I should be the last to invite you not to discriminate about the present. We must be cautious in estimating the very popular writers or painters of our time; but we must not dismiss them because they are popular. We should be tall enough to worship in a crowd. Let our criticism be aristocratic, our taste fastidious, and let our sympathies be democratic and catholic. Dickens, I suppose, is one of the most popular writers who ever lived, and yet he is part of the structure of our literature; but as Dickens is dead, I prefer to mention the names of three living writers, who are also popular, and have become corner-stones of the same building—Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. H. G. Wells. 'There are at all times,' says Schopenhauer, 'two literatures in progress running side by side, but little known to each other; the one real, the other only apparent. The former grows into permanent literature: it is pursued by those who live for science or poetry. The other is pursued by those who live on science or poetry; but after a few years one asks where are they? where is the glory that came so soon and made so much clamour?' We are happy if we can discriminate between those two literatures.

While we should remember that there are at all times intellects whose work is more for posterity than for the present; work which appeals, perhaps, only to the few, that of artists whose work has no purchasers, writers whose books may have publishers but few readers, we must be cautious about accepting the verdict of the dove-cot. There are many obscure artists and writers whose work, though admired by a select few, remains very properly obscure, and will always remain obscure; it is of no value intellectually; the world should know nothing of its inferior men. Sometimes, however, it is these inferior men who are able to get temporary places as critics, and inform us in leading articles that ours is an age of Decadence. Every new drama, every work of art which possesses individuality or gives a fresh point of view or evinces development of any kind, is held up as an instance of Decay. 'L'ecole decadent' was a phrase invented as a jest in 1886, I believe by Monsieur Bourde, a journalist in Paris. It was eagerly adopted by the Parisians, and soon floated across the Channel. Used as a term of reproach, it was accepted by the group of poets it was intended to ridicule. I need not remind you that the master of that school was Paul Verlaine, the immortal poet who enlarged the scope of French verse—the poet who achieved for French poetry what I am told the so-called decadent philosopher Nietzsche has done for German prose. Unfortunately I do not know German, and it seems almost impossible to add to the German language. But Nietzsche, I am assured by competent authorities, has performed a similar feat to that of Luther on the issue of his Bible.

When, therefore, we hear of decadence in literature or art, even if we accept Mr. Balfour's definition of its symptom—'the employment of an over-wrought technique'—we must remember that Decadence and Decay have now different meanings, though originally they meant the same sort of thing. An over-wrought technique is characteristic of the decadent school of France, particularly of Mallarme, and some of our own decadents. Walter Pater and Sir Thomas Browne. The existence of writers adopting an over-wrought technique, however, is not (and Mr. Balfour would repudiate the idea) a sign of decay as commonplace moralists would have us believe, but of realised perfection. Pater is the most perfect prose writer we ever produced. The Euphuists of the sixteenth century were of course decadents, and I think you will admit that they did not herald any decay in our literature.

The truth is that men after a certain age, if not on the crest of the waves themselves, become bored with counting the breakers, and decide that the tide is going out. You must often have had arguments with friends on this subject when walking by the sea. The water seems to be receding; you can see that there is an ebb; and then an unusually long wave comes up and wets your feet. Great writers are guilty of a similar error without any intention of contriving a literary conceit (as I suspect many a past outcry to have been). Even Pater declared that he would not disturb himself by reading any contemporary literature published by an author who did not exist before 1870. He never read Stevenson or Kipling. Now that is a terrible state to be in; it is a symptom of premature old age; not physical but mental old age.

The art of the present day is not architecture, painting, or literature. It is the art of remaining young. It is the art of life. It is a science. The fairer, the stronger, the better sex—shall I call its members our equals or our superiors?—have always realised this. Indeed, they have employed ingenious mechanical contrivances for arresting the march of time or that physical decay of which we are all victims. Sometimes they may be said to have indulged in an over-wrought technique, which may be the reason why we are told that every woman is at heart a decadent. Otto Weininger certainly thought so. I have always regretted that the male sex was precluded by prejudice from following their example. I regret somewhat acutely the desuetude of the periwig.

So we can take an example from women—they are so often our theme, let them be our examples in a symbolical sense. If we choose, we too can remain young intellectually, sensitive to new impressions, new impulses and new revelations, whether of science or art. The Greeks of the fifth century, and even of the age of St. Paul, preserved their youth by cultivating the superb gift of curiosity, delightful anxiety about the present and future. William Morris once described the Whigs as careless of the past, ignorant of the present, and fearful of the future. Whatever your politics are, do not be like the Whigs as described by William Morris. Cultivate a feminine curiosity. I used to be told the old story of Blue Beard as a warning against that particular failing. I see in it a much profounder moral. It is the emancipation of woman; and asserts her right, if not to vote, at least to be curious. Her curiosity rid the world of a monster, and in her curiosity we see the nucleus of the new drama. That little blood-stained key unlocked for us the cupboard where the family skeleton had been left too long in the cold; it was time that he joined the festive board, or, at least, appeared on the boards: and now, I am glad to say, he has done so; and he is called new-fangled. Do not let us call things 'new-fangled.' New-fangled medicine probably saves fifty per cent. of the population from premature death. Do not speak of the 'crudity of youth.' Youth is sometimes crude. It is better than being rude. It is an error to mock at the single virtue a possible offender may possess. I observe that men of science remain younger intellectually, and even physically, than artists or men of letters. I believe it is because to them science is always full of surprises and fresh impressions. They know there is practically no end to their knowledge; and that in the study of science there is no decay, whatever they may detect in the crust of the earth or on the face of heaven. They are never satisfied with the past. They look to youth and its enthusiasms for realising their own dreams and developing their own hypotheses. And as there are great men of science to-day, so, too, there are great men of letters, great poets, and great painters, some of whose names you may not have heard. But when you do hear of them I beg of you not to regard any of them as symptoms of decay, even if their technique is elaborate and over-wrought. The early work of every modern painter is over-elaborate and over-wrought, just as all the work of early painters is over-elaborate and over-wrought. Do not greet the dawn as though it were a lowering sunset. Listen, and, with William Blake, you may hear the sons of God shouting for joy. If your mind is bent on decay, read that neglected poet, Byron. He thought the romantic movement, of which he became the accidental centre, a symptom of decay. Read any period of history and its literature, and you will find the same cry reiterated. When you have read an old book go out and buy a new one. When you have sold your old masters, go out and buy new masters. Aladdin's maid is one of the wronged characters of legend. . . . Of the Pierian spring there are many fountains. Yet it is a spring which never runs dry; though it flows with greater freedom at one season than at another, with greater volume from one fountain than some other. In the glens of Parnassus there are hidden flowers always blooming; though, to the binoculars of the tourist, the mountain seems unusually barren. You will find that youth does not vanish with the rose, that you need never close the sweet-scented manuscript of love, science, art or literature. In them youth returns like daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty: or like the snapdragons which Cardinal Newman saw blossoming on the wall at Oxford, and which became for him the symbol of hope. For us they may stand as the symbol of realisation and the immortality of the human intellect, in which there has been no decay since the days of Tubal Cain.

To J. G. LEGGE, ESQ.

THE END