lofty and difficult buttress the Chinese language repels all transient invaders. Behind that wall the keen eyes of busy capitalists have detected fresh fields of wealth, and the hearts of eager evangelists throb with the thought that the largest congregation of the human species speaking one language are living there in unspeakable idolatry, ignorance, and vice. We are accustomed to think of China as one of the gardens of man's childhood; but is it not likely to prove also the great vantageground of the future? In all probability the hand-to-hand conflict will not come in our day or in our children's. But one hundred, two hundred, three hundred or more years hence, when California and Australia teem with population, great raceproblems will surely have been solved on Chinese soil, and our civilization and our religion will have been tested, to their higher glory or their deeper shame, by the sternest yet truest of all earthly judges, Time.

ARTICLE VI.-THE IDEAL IN LITERATURE.

A REVIEW OF THE "ENGLISH NOVEL" BY SIDNEY LANIER. The English Novel and the Principles of its Development. By SIDNEY LANIER. Chas. Scribner's Sons. 1883.

"You observe," says the late Sidney Lanier speaking of Jane Eyre and Charlotte Bronté, "you observe that one of these figures is just as real to us as the other; and I have lost all sense of difference between actual and literary existence." That this is true explains many of the defects in Mr Lanier's almost perfect lectures; he fails in subtle differentiations.

Because he thus fails, he confuses the moral and the didactic; he shudders at the sight of truth from the fear of its mercilessness; he prefers the mystical to the actual. But that this is true also explains a part of the gracious charm of his writing and leaves the reader for the moment in complete sympa thy with his attitude. Indeed, in admiration for the man one forgets his work. The book attracts; the man fascinates. He hated the unlovely, he craved the beautiful. Indeed his own spiritual aspirations limit him, and, because he reaches out toward the Infinite Good, and also takes full delight only in that which is in itself lovely, he leaps to the conclusion that Beauty and Truth are identical. "For indeed," says he, "we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty-that he in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light, within him-he is not yet the great artist. Here it is most instructive to note how fine and beautiful souls of time appear after awhile to lose all sense of distinction between these terms Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like." This is a rarely beautiful passage. But it is not the voice of God. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked." "God moves in a mysterious

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 influence 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
electric. We sing to them, dance to them.

rythmic, they are 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 im mensely 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