Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word. So, note by note, bring music from your mind, So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts, "The Ring and the Book." Browning. 306 JUST in proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within. 807. NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM. Walter Pater. SWEEP away the illusion of Time; glance, if thou have eyes, from the near moving-cause to its far-distant Mover: The stroke that came transmitted through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball only had been struck, and sent flying? O, could I transport thee direct from the Beginnings to the Endings, how were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the Light-sea of celestial wonder! Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every. star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish. Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and as authentic as heart could wish; wellnigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into Air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and æons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber; and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar, and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead, — till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the Steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?— Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand-million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our Me; wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:- and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped-in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little Life Carlyle THE HE word 'excite.' XL EARNESTNESS. earnestness' comes from a root meaning to It means an eager desire of the heart for the cause of truth; the deep longing that other men shall accept a truth which is realized by the speaker. The earnest man feels so intensely the importance of a truth that he longs to share it with his race. Earnestness is the secret of success in any department of life. It is only the earnest man who wins his cause. The indifferent or passive waiting for things to happen, failure to realize the deep importance of truth or to have conviction, are marks of a man who has no power over his fellow men. The vivid conception, the intense realization of truth, awakens the impulse to express. Noble expression is the manifestation of the whole man. Its fundamental condition must be that all the faculties and powers be awake; hence, earnestness of thought lies at the basis of all naturalness and power. In all speaking earnestness is essential, because expression is the conveying of a truth, and if a truth is conveyed without any desire to have it accepted, it becomes insipid and lifeless. One who sees and realizes a truth has an earnest desire that others shall realize it. Earnestness in life and art is the desire for achievement, it is the longing to accomplish something better, to actualize something ideal. Earnestness can be developed. One step for its improvement is meditation; he who meditates or holds an idea or truth before the mind awakens every faculty. The whole nature responds so that he speaks with life and power. It is only by continuous dwelling upon ideas that we feel their importance. Earnestness implies that there is an ideal as well as an actual, that there are possibilities to be attained. Meditation over an ideal, or a comparison of the ideal with the actual, awakens a desire to modify and transform the actual. Earnestness is important in all speaking, because it implies purpose. It is the yearning desire to accomplish a purpose. Animation results from an intense realization of an idea for its own sake; earnestness adds to this the realization of a purpose or desire to express so as to sway the hearts of men. All speaking is in time; earnestness gives the rhythmic pulsations to mind and voice, and thus develops movement,-the highest characteristic of art. may desire to Every noble speaker must have a cause: he teach or to rouse men; he may desire simply to cause them to realize a truth, to persuade them. His appeal may be to some special part of man's nature, to his head or to his heart, to intellect, emotion, or will. Sometimes it is to all of these. Earnestness is that intense and instinctive reaching out for the part in the nature of another man which is awake in our own. All expression is dependent upon awakening the same faculty in another man which is active in ourselves. Expression cannot give a truth; it only draws it out. Expression shows the action of a faculty or set of faculties in one man to another in such a way as to awaken the same faculties or powers in another soul. Earnestness is thus the secret of magnetism. The opposite of earnestness is indifference. An indifferent man cares no more for one thing than for another. All things to him are the same; he does not care whether men around him are better or worse. Earnestness has been called the moral quality of art, because it corresponds to sincerity and nobleness. An earnest man means what he says and says what he means. He so realizes a truth that he sacrifices himself and his manner for a cause. There is a tendency at the present time, and there always has been, for culture to end in indifference. A cultivated man tends to separate himself from the world, to look on merely as a spectator, and to take an interest in things merely from the outside. He has no pity for the unfortunate, no great desire for the amelioration of the race. There is also a tendency to regard all art as having an element of moral indifference, as having nothing to do with right or wrong. Art must be for Art's sake; its highest aim is simply beauty. Whatever is pleasing is the fundamental law of right art. This is not wholly true. Art deals with the ideal, and in pleasing, man seeks to please with what is highest. It makes a distinction between what is low and what is high, because that which pleases merely the physical is not artistic. That which appeals to the imagination and the higher faculties of men is the more artistic. Art is thus concerned with the aspirations of men. There are other opposites to earnestness besides indifference. Doubt of any kind, uncertainty as to the thought or to the truth, a lack of conviction, all these tend to destroy earnestness. Earnestness implies a simple attitude of soul towards truth; it implies loyalty, truthfulness, sincerity; it implies the giving of the man's whole nature for truth; it implies the willingness to suffer for the cause of truth. There are many misconceptions of earnestness. Some regard all earnestness as merely synonymous with loudness or violence, an exaggerated use of gestures, or an extravagant amount of force. It is very important to distinguish between muscular earnestness and mental earnestness. An earnestness which is merely |