when he succeeds in presenting views of life rather than of his personal mood. Then he begins to be a seer, a prophet. In this richer and nobler sense, the Tintern Abbey and the Ode on Immortality are presentative. They are the climax of presentative poetry, poetry where self passes out of sight, and life finds a spiritual interpreter. Much of our best lyrical poetry, however, is purely presentative of the mood of the singer for instance, Shelley's

"I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,"

where the winds and stars and champak odors exist merely to reflect a personal passion; or Burns's—

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon

How can ye bloom sae fair."

Such poetry may be very beautiful, but it is prone to fall into what Ruskin styles the pathetic fallacy, because nature is wrested out of her rights to a seeming sympathy with man's little joys and griefs.

Representative Art. - As art, when it is merely structural or presentative, is not at its highest, so also when it depends upon imitation alone. Poetry, for instance, that should give a literal description of a butterfly, or a mere catalogue of events, would hardly be poetry. But when imitation rises above the servile copy and represents life as seen and constructed imaginatively, it has reached the goal predestined. The representative artist modifies the actual object : he tells us not all that it was, but what it is to him, or might be. He gives us, by a few master strokes, the impression which nature made upon him, the meaning that nature had for him; he proceeds by choosing, re-collecting, and combining characteristic particulars which reproduce no one definite original, but a creative image, a typical representative of the salient ideas or qualities that he desires to portray. If Andrea del Sarto paints Madonnas from his wife without idealizing her,—in so far he fails. Michelangelo reproduces the universal, not the particular, beauty; Rafael, the eternal motherhood. Shakespeare does not derive his Brutus wholly from the historical personage of that name, but from him and others who possessed, or might have possessed, similar spirit or qualities. He does not in his Macbeth or Othello record events as they came to his hand in Holinshed or Cinthio; he selects, reorders, combines, constructs, — produces that which is more than a duplicate of nature: a living thing. So representative poetry, just like presentative, may pass into a higher style, or shall we say into its own highest, namely, the creative. Chaucer is a representative poet, Shakespeare, a creative.

Interpretative and Creative Art. When the artist is at his best, and here we are thinking especially of the poet, he at one and the same time interprets the significance of life in its broad, enduring, and spiritual aspect, and creates characters who live the life. He is Prophet or Seer, and also Maker. He sends forth his creatures as realities to move up and down among us, Cæsars, Shylocks, Orlandos, Desdemonas, Ophelias, Portias, significant in the glow of that eternity whose touch is art.

3. THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS

The arts may be classified in many ways, but here we shall consider them, very briefly, according to the mode of their manifestation, the material that they use, their respective capability of expression, and the senses to which they severally appeal.

As to the mode, some represent nature at rest, and may be called arts of space; others represent nature in movement, and may be called arts of time. The former are architecture, sculpture, and painting; the latter are the art of dancing as it was elaborately practised by the ancients, the art of music, and that of poetry.

Somewhat akin to this classification is that according to the material used. Architecture and sculpture present material of three dimensions ; painting, however, is less fettered, since it employs for its representations the plane or surface, that is to say, two dimensions. The plastic arts, sculpture and painting, since they deal with material at rest, are limited to the portrayal of a momentary scene, but that of course should be significant, looking before and after, and sufficient, so that we do not weary of it because guessing at the outcome. The arts, on the other hand, which use for their material motions and sounds, following each other in time, as music, acting, and the literature of recital and song, should aim to present events or emotions as they follow each other in order. They deal preferably and properly with the progress of that which they portray. They may, of course, describe details lying side by side in space, but they should, if possible, describe them as they have progressively affected the spectator.

If we classify the arts according to the grade and scope of thought or life that each may express, we find, but I cannot discuss the reasons, that the order runs upward somewhat thus: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. In music the artist presents not material structure, like architecture, nor the forms of natural or human life, like painting and sculpture, but the soul divested of the tangible: the conflict of moods, its progression and resolution, the history of emotions, — all in terms of sound, of melody, of harmony, of graduated intervals. Poetry, that is to say lyric, reflective, narrative, and the dra

matic, when read, may, like music, suggest emotional moods and movements by sequences and variations of sound; like sculpture and painting it may represent living beings at strife or in concord: but it does this, not by means of the actual and concrete, but by constructing an ideal world out of words and images, that is to say, out of symbols. The words must be translated by the understanding of the hearer, and images by the imagination; therefore, to appreciate poetry at all, one must exercise a certain logical and poetic faculty not required in every case by the other arts. Poetry, therefore, stands very high in the hierarchy of the arts. Drama, when it is acted, adds, moreover, to poetry other charms, those of sculpture, painting, and pantomime; the spectacle of human form, moving, speaking, and acting.

If we classify arts according to the senses to which they appeal, it will be seen that products of artifice, such as articles prepared for the palate, and perfumes, are so closely allied with physical needs and uses as to be practically beyond the pale. Architecture has, like the handicrafts, its utility in the practical world, but, appealing to the perception of mass and distance and to vision, it delights the higher and more delicately organized taste as well. Sculpture appeals both to the sense of touch and that of sight; painting to the sight, but by way of both form and color; music to hearing and the perception of movement; poetry directly to hearing, the sense of movement, and sight, and, by the medium of imagination, to these and all other senses as well.

4. LITERATURE IN GENERAL

It will be evident from what has been said that all arts are one in this: they aim to express the thought of man by some modification of the materials in which man works. They differ in the materials which they use, the modes of manifestation, the ideals which they are able to convey, and the senses to which they appeal. A distinction was drawn in a previous paragraph between the handicrafts modifying natural material for purely practical purposes, like carpentering or tailoring, and the arts adapting nature not for purposes of practical utility but the better to express its meaning or to suggest the meaning of life. Of course, in a broad sense the term "art" is frequently applied both to handicrafts

the industrial arts, and to the fine arts, for all of these are alike, in that they modify nature according to a conscious purpose. Some of the latter, however, even though they have the possibilities of fine art, like architecture and landscape gardening, may in a degree be also subservient to purposes of utility; and to the industrial arts painting and sculpture may be allied by practical uses, as in house decoration; while music may lend itself to assist the march of soldiers in battle or the progress of pleasure at a dinner. But when the fine arts flourish in

their perfection, when the thought expressed is not of physical need or comfort, but an ideal clothed in the only form that for it is inherent, rhythmic, and articulate, — and when this ideal so made manifest evokes unselfish emotion and fires the free imagination, there is no question of the difference between handicraft and art.

Practical Literature. - Literature may in general be defined as the product of thought in language committed to permanent form by writing. It is in the broad sense inclusive of all works of the kind, whether of actual or spiritual import, practical or artistic form; but when it consists of mere records and the communication of facts, as in reports, official papers, the journals of the day, business correspondence, text-books, or historical or scientific publications intended to disseminate information, it is a handicraft.

Belles Lettres. — Literature begins to enter the realm of fine art when it gives expression to thoughts and feelings about the ideal interests of mankind, and that in a form which stimulates the imagination and interests the feelings. The literature of scientific discovery, when conveyed with artistic arrangement and inviting style, as in the writings of Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley, the literature of history as presented by Thucydides or Gibbon, or of philosophy as in the dialogues of Plato, or of politics as reviewed by Macaulay, the oratory of Burke and Webster and Phillips Brooks, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and Lowell, — these are all artistic, even though the purpose be to instruct or to convince. For the inspiring qualities of the material, whether ethical, political, scientific, or religious, and the charm of manner and style with which it is presented, as well as the appeal made to the imaginative and creative faculty of the reader and to his feelings, combine to lift the literature of purpose into the realm of ideal enjoyment where art resides and controls. The rhythm of the language in such artistic literature of purpose is of the flowing, variable, natural kind, appropriate to prose, a rhythm not yet held in restraint by the metrical laws which govern verse. In proportion, however, as the attempt is to win the interest of the reader, not simply by the instructiveness of its material but by the manner of the presentation, the product is more or less entitled to rank as Fine, Polite, or Artistic Literature, Belles Lettres.

Pure or Creative Literature. - When the author, proceeding a step further, selects a subject no longer of practical or particular nature, but transfigured by imagination, or imaginatively constructed, and when he presents this with conscious elaboration, in order that the appeal may be directly to the imagination of his readers and the emotions that delight in the ideal, his production is Pure or Creative Literature. The form of his writing may retain the larger rhythms of natural speech,

as in prose drama, or it may adopt the more highly and delicately organized vesture of verse, — rhythm regulated by metre, and by the accord of word-sounds in tone, sequence, and rhyme. The latter is Poetry Proper, ballad, lyric, epic, drama, idyl, pastoral, reflective poem, elegy, or masque, as the case may be.

5. POETRY PROPER

Verse and Prose. It is not the use of verse alone, that is to say, metrically arranged rhythm, that constitutes poetry; prose, such as that of everyday speech, and verse as we know it in metres, rhymes, and stanzas, are merely instruments, and they may be used indifferently by literature of the instructive kind or by the literature of the imagination. But as a rule, poetry, since it treats of ideal thought in a highly imaginative way and for the purpose of appealing to the higher feelings of man, finds its appropriate expression in that highly organized rhythm governed by metrical laws which is called verse. For this organized rhythm is exquisitely fitted to awaken the muscular and nervous rhythms of the human organization and to correspond to their pulsation, their swing, so to speak, when they are under the influence of emotion. In other words, the rhythm of sound and that of exalted feeling speak the same tongue. Prose is naturally the language of communication; verse, of emotion, or of imagination under the control of emotion. Poetry, or, as the word means, creation, differs from the material and product of everyday communication in that it implies supreme and concentrated imaginative and emotive effort; it expresses itself most readily in the pulsation and swing of sensitive, rhythmical, and highly accentuated utterance, such as we call verse. Everybody will concede to poetry a superior simplicity and imaginative concreteness, compactness, emotive force, and capability to be remembered over the literature expressed in prose; but superiority in these respects would explain poetry only as a higher kind of prose. It would establish a difference of degree, to be sure, but upon an altogether false basis. Poetry is neither heightened prose nor any other degree of prose. It is different in its nature, and it calls for a different medium of expression.

Prose and verse are, as I have said, merely instruments. They may both of them be instruments of poetry; and on that account creative fiction and creative drama, even though in prose, are ordinarily called poetical, and poetical they certainly may be. But verse, because it is nearer akin and more sensitive to the ebb and flow of emotion, is still the appropriate instrument for the literature that is totally emotional and imaginative, namely, poetry. If we take the thought of a poem and turn it into prose, as, for instance, the thought of Wordsworth's