now certainly on the wane.15 At the recent Congress of Berlin religious equality was supported by all, even-inconsistent as it may be-by persecuting Russia. The relaxation of civil authority over religious acts will, it may be confidently hoped, in spite of occasional retrogressions, gradually spread over the less civilised part of Europe as savagery abates, and reciprocal reverence and consideration become more common between men who differ as to their religious views.

What is desirable for the stability of governments and for the happiness of subjects is that each legislature and executive should recognise its own incompetence to dictate practices and impose religious beliefs upon their subjects. No individuals or their representatives can rationally pretend to override the serious conscientious convictions of their fellows. The absurdly arrogant pretension so to do was the bane of the first French Revolution, and is the bane of the liberalism of Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland now.

The true end of social as well as of individual life, the promotion of goodwill, must certainly, however slowly, bring about due tolerance, and a just equilibrium, however much the pendulum may be first made to oscillate by the less moral and intelligent of the two sections (conservative and progressive) which divide civilised communities. But the welfare of the nation can no more than the welfare of self be the ultimate boundary of our desires and efforts. Our conscience plainly tells us that we should, as far as we can, labour for the benefit of the whole human family, the members of which are all alike 'persons,' all possessed of an ineffable dignity, all capable of acts comparable with nothing but the activity of the Creator, capable of bringing forth fruits compared with which the most beautiful or awful of merely physical phenomena sink into relative insignificancecapable, that is, of moral actions-capable of virtue, which, we before saw, all human life and even all known organic life has for the final object of its being.

Thus it seems that the application of ethical principles to the phenomena of social existence, as known to us through history and observation, tends to the conciliation of the well-meaning of both the sections of mankind just referred to. Too many men in each section unhappily misunderstand the real objects and desires of numbers of the other section.

On the one hand we have men devoted to morality and to its essence religion, opposing progress' and hating its watchwords as necessarily hostile to all they revere.

On the other hand we have men devoted to morality in the form

15 It is remarkable that the German-speaking people should be in this so much behind the Dutch. Thus Professor Haeckel of Jena, in the preface to his biological romance entitled The Evolution of Man (recently translated into English), actually says: We do indeed now enjoy the unusual pleasure of seeing "most Christian bishops" and Jesuits exiled and imprisoned.'

of philanthropy, opposing religion and its ministers as enemies of civilisation and progress.

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Round each party are gathered men united with it from lower motives. Round the party of progress,' indeed, howl the energumenes of license and disorder such as have lately shown themselves in their true colours at Marseilles. But their vices and follies must not blind us to the good intentions of those to whom they cling, and of whom they hope to make use, any more than religious men should suffer for the faults of the superstitious-that is, of believers it may be, but believers deficient in love for God as well as for their fellow-men.

If there is any value, any truth, in the considerations put forward in these papers, it would seem that an analysis of the watchwords which have found such widespread acceptance, shows that union may be effected and social peace concluded between all men who recognise that the one end of life is duty, and this without any repudiation of cherished expressions. It is surely preferable to retain these expressions (on account of the good things they really signify), rather than abandon them to the misuse of those who deceitfully avail themselves of the favourable connotations such expressions convey, the better to disguise the tyrannical nature of their real aims.16

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Thus the ideals of modern Liberalism, freedom' (especially 'freedom of conscience'), a political 'social contract,' as also 'equality' and fraternity,' all find their true realisation in the recognition of 'duty' as the aim of life, and may be adopted without scruple by patriotic Conservatism. In the idea of duty' is found their true realisation, while the delusions which have seduced men to the worship of false idols in their place, stand revealed through such conception as if touched by the spear of Ithuriel. The idols which have been set up for the true God have been freedom for the passions,' the envious levelling of superiority,' the abolition of reverence '—the abolition of reverence for man's essence (his moral responsibility), the abolition of reverence for the world, and the abolition of reverence for God. These idols overthrown, in their place stand disclosed the true objects of esteem. These are the various forms of activity in pursuit of physical, emotional, intellectual, and, above all, moral good, which arise from the conscientious pursuit in things great and small, alike by individuals and by States, of duty as the one aim of life. It is this conception which intensifies, beautifies, and transfigures human life, and it is this which alone gives to it dignity and significance.

ST. GEORGE MIVART.

16 While these sheets are going to press, M. Jules Ferry has inaugurated a fresh Radical tyranny by proposing a law which is to deprive French parents of the liberty of continuing to educate their children as they have hitherto chosen to educate them.

IS A GREAT SCHOOL OF ART POSSIBLE

IN THE PRESENT DAY?

IN Plato's Phædrus Socrates says: The soul, which has seen most of truth, shall come to the birth as a philosopher, or artist, or musician, or lover; that which has seen truth in the second degree shall be a righteous king, or warrior, or lord; the soul which is of the third class shall be a politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth a prophet or hierophant; to the sixth a poet or imitator will be appropriate; to the seventh the life of an artisan or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the ninth that of a tyrant;—all these are states of probation, in which he who lives righteously improves, and he who lives unrighteously deteriorates, his lot.'George Eliot' makes Cosimo say in Romola, Va! Your human talk and doings are a tame jest; the only passionate life is in form and colour.'

We may or we may not agree with Socrates in putting the artist in the first rank, or with Cosimo's view of the place art takes in life; but it is as well to know on what a very high level wise minds have placed the artistic nature before we consider the present or future possible condition of art.

Somehow the art we see in our annual exhibitions hardly, as a rule, enforces to our minds the truth of the wisdom of Socrates. His opinion of the highest worth of the artist soul is not brought vividly before us in looking round the Royal Academy walls, or even if we select solely the works by the heads of that institution. The souls of the Royal Academicians may have come to the birth having seen most of truth,' but their work does not often suggest any very superior insight into the essence of things; nor can the modern artist be said, as a rule, 'to forget earthly interests and be wrapt in the divine, so that the vulgar deem him mad and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.' Nor should we think, judging from his work, that to the successful artist of our time 'human talk and doings appear tame jests' by reason of the fulness and passion of his life in form and colour.

Yet how much of the world is occupied in art, how much expert

Jowett's translation, vol. i.

ness in it exists, what a quantity of pictures crop up every year, cleverly painted up to a certain point! There is undoubtedly much art produced, but surely it is not the same art which Socrates and Cosimo mean. Work which is the result of imitation, which Socrates puts in the sixth rank, we have in abundance; but mere portraiture, the result of the imitative faculty, though it may earn respect as a valuable record of people and places, is not high art, and cannot inspire the enthusiasm which creative genius commands. The highest art is the result pre-eminently of an effort of the soul, in other words, an effort of the highest part of our being, as well as of much that is mere instinct and mere aptitude of hand, eye, and intellect. It is the impress of something beyond and above mere mind that inspires that feeling of inimitable perfection in the best work of the Greeks and the highest Italian school.

Now why should we rest content, feeling as we do such an interest in art, in looking towards the standard of former times as so hopelessly unattainable in the present day? What has been done by human faculties ought to be able to be done again, if only we are wise enough to find out the true conditions which developed those faculties to perfection, and strong enough to reproduce those conditions.

Probably why our modern art strikes us, with a few exceptions, as falling so short of the old inspired work, is that we do not even apply, either to its performance or its consideration, that higher part of our nature which alone can raise our efforts to the high level art ought, we think, for the wholesomeness of our civilisation, to occupy practically as well as theoretically. These few exceptions, however, make our condition anything but hopeless. Whilst work of the highest intention is being carried out by the rare artistic gifts of even only two or three artists, we have but to create a sympathy with that work among the masses, and a powerful influence for good would at once be the result; and, besides the individual genius of a few great men, a certain amount of interest is awakening on the subject of art in almost all cultivated classes. To direct this interest towards what is really noblest, to extend it so that it touches the masses in a wholesome way with a great and genial refining influence, ought to be the keen desire of the advanced philanthropists of our time, as of all true art-lovers.

The Royal Academy has just elected the most perfect of presidents, Sir Frederick Leighton, who will no doubt do all that culture and art-knowledge can do to get that institution into a proper frame of mind about its duties, and the influence it might possess, if it took a wide view of the vital interests of art; but even Sir Frederick Leighton's influence will not touch the worst difficulty, which lies in the want of the most elementary instinct for beauty in the masses.

All earnest thinkers on the subject must own that there exist

serious obstacles in the conditions of modern society-obstacles, moreover, which seem ever growing-to the spreading of the noblest artfeeling even among the educated, and that just complaints may be made against the art, and still more against the criticism of art of the present day, taken as a whole.

There is a quantity of work turned out as fine art in which there is no pretence or shadow of an aim at high intention, and, though recognised by all who have a fine taste as worse than useless, choking up the better work and overcrowding the market with pictures which degrade art, it has a bad influence on the public, even if only by counteracting the right effect of good work. But besides this spurious art, there is some wrong condition in our social life which makes the right influence Art has had on highly civilised societies in which she has flourished, very difficult to produce on the masses nowadays; and it is useless to think of a great school of art if we ignore the fact that it is out of the essence of a people, not from a crust-like, superadded culture, such great schools arise. Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh,' and it is out of the emotions, out of the sensibilities, but mostly out of the religion of a people, its art springs.

Undoubtedly we have two or three great men among our artists, poet-painters whose work would hold its own in all times and in all schools, also many earnest workers who imitate nature faithfully, and a few singularly gifted decorators; still all those who have studied Art as she flourished in artistic nations must agree that this is not an artistic age. The gratification of the sense of the beautiful is not essential to our well-being or our happiness; ugliness does not offend us seriously. It is true great struggles are being made through a desire for general culture and wide liberal sympathies to seek and find the beautiful, but that instinct which makes things sightly without a struggle has left us. The poet Morris and a few other decorators and architects have landed some of the richer class beyond the horrors of aniline dyes and the depressing architecture of London streets still aniline dyes remain a success, and Belgravia and South Kensington, hideously dull in their monotony, and vulgar in ostentatious and useless size, are fashionable, are daily deadening the sense of the beautiful in the rising generation brought up in their streets and squares. Here and there an artistic house appears, a spot to be measured by the foot, compared with the miles of dismal houses built by contract for as small a sum of money and as costly an appearance as are compatible. Utility and convenience are often used as pleas for ugliness; but if ugliness inspired the mental discomfort which it does in artistic nations, ugliness would not succeed even if found to be useful and convenient. It would not succeed if the opposing dislike was strong enough to be a force. If ugliness produced the jar on the ordinary educated English mind which dirt, untidiness, or an absence in surroundings of the respectable' element produces, modern