IV.

THE points discussed at our last meeting were mainly of such a nature that I need not occupy your time with the detailed review which has seemed advisable heretofore.

You will remember, in a general way, that we finished examining the claims of the poetry of the future, as presented by Whitman, and found reason to believe, from several trains of argument, that its alleged democratic spirit was based on a political misconception; that its religious spirit was no more than that general feeling of good fellowship and cameraderie which every man of the world knows to be the commonest of virtues among certain classes; its strength rested upon purely physical qualifications which have long ago practically ceased to be strength; its contempt for dandyism was itself only a cruder dandyism, and its proposed substitution of power for beauty not only an artistic blindness but a historical error as to the general progress of this world, which has been from strength to beauty ever since the ponderous old gods Oceanus and Gæa-representatives of rude strength-gave way to the more orderly (that is, more beautiful) reign of Saturn, and he in turn to the still more orderly and beauty-representing Jupiter, whom Chaucer has called the "fadyr of delicacye."

Passing thus from the Whitman school, we attacked that third misconception of literary form which had taken the shape of the so-called naturalistic school, as led by Zola in his novels and defended by him in his

recent work, The Experimental Romance. Here we quickly discovered that if the term "experiment" were used by this school in its ordinary and scientific sense, it would, in a large number of cases, involve conditions which would exterminate the authors of the projected experimental romances often at an early stage of the plot; but that secondly, this inconvenience was avoided through the very peculiar meaning which was attached to the word by this school, and which reveals that they make no more use of experiment, in point of fact, than any one of the numerous novelists who have for years been in the habit of studying real life and nature as the basis of their work.

In short, it appeared that to support the propriety of circulating such books by calling them experimental romances, was as if a man should sell profitable poison under the name of scientific milk, and claim therefor both the gratitude of society and the privileges of science. Finally, supplying ourselves with clear ideas as to the difference between what has become so well known in modern times as the scientific imagination and the poetic imagination, we determined to regard the novel as a true work of art, and the novelist as an artist, by reason of the created forms in the novel which were shown to be the distinctive outcome of the poetical imagination as opposed to the formula which is the distinctive outcome of the scientific imagination. Nevertheless, in view of the circumstance that the facts embodied in these forms are facts which must have been collected by a genuine exercise of the true scientific faculty of observing and classifying, we were compelled to regard the novel as a joint product of science and art, ranking as art by virtue of its final purely artistic outcome in the shape of beautiful created forms.

It is with a sense of relief that one turns away from what I fear has seemed the personal and truculent tone of the last lecture-an appearance almost inseparable from the fact that certain schools of writing have become represented by the names of their living founders, and which would, indeed, have prevented your present lecturer from engaging in the discussion had not his reluctance been overwhelmed by the sacred duty of protesting against all this forcible occupation of the temple of art by those who have come certainly not for worship; it is with a sense of relief that one turns from this to pursue the more gracious and general studies which will now occupy us.

According to the plan already sketched: having now acquired some clear fundamental conceptions of the correlations among form, science, art, and the like notions often so vaguely used, we are next to inquire, as our first main line of research: Is it really true that what was explained as the growth in human personality is the continuing single principle of human progress; is it really true that the difference between the time of Æschylus and the time of (say) George Eliot is the difference in the strength with which the average man feels the scope and sovereignty of his age? For upon this fundamental point necessarily depends our final proposition that the modern novel is itself the expression of this intensified personality and an expression which could only be made by greatly extending the form of the Greek drama. Pursuing our custom of leaving the abstract and plunging into the concrete as soon as possible, let us determine this question by endeavoring to find some special notable works of antique and of modern times in which substan. tially the same subject matter has been treated; let us then compare the difference in treatment, let us summar

ize the picture of things evidently existing in the old, as contrasted with the modern author's and reader's minds; and finally let us see whether the differences thus emerging will not force themselves upon us as differences growing out of personality. For the purposes of this comparison I have thought that the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley, and the Prince Deukalion of Bayard Taylor offered inviting resources as works which treat substantially the same story, although the first was written some two thousand three hundred years before the last two. Permit me then, in beginning this comparison, to set before you these three works in the broadest possible sketch by reading from each, here and there a line such as may bring the action freshly before you and at the same time elucidate specially the differences in treatment we are in searce of. As I now run rapidly through the Prometheus of Æschylus, I ask you to bear along in mind the precise nature of this spontaneous variation between man and man which I was at some pains to define in my first lecture; and perhaps I may extend profitably the partial idea there given by adopting a pretty fancy which I find in No. 44 of Tennyson's In Memoriam, and carrying it to a larger sphere than there intended. The poet is here expressing the conception that perhaps the main use of this present life of ours is for each one to learn himself,-possibly as preparatory to learning other things hereafter. He says: The baby new to earth and sky

What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,

Has never thought that 'this is I:'

But as he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'
And finds, 'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'

So rounds he to a separate mind

From whence clear memory may begin,

As thro' the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath,

Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew

Beyond the second birth of Death.

Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single child passing through a single life to the collective process of growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself -"that I am I"-so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new forms to clothe them in.

One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of the ego feeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in the poem De Profundis, partially read to you, was poetically called "the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world, whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and free will, between the Infinite Personality, which should