say the Prophet is a Lyre played upon by the Divine Plectrum.) 1 Thus the seasons of the year, with their ever-varying and splendid pageantsthe sky and the ocean, calm and storm, lakes and rivers, vales and mountains, meetings and partings, life and death,-will play upon the mind and heart of the peasant just as they play upon the mind and the heart of a great Poet. The difference between the peasant's emotional response to Nature and the emotional response of a great Poet will be that of quality and degree-not of kind. Even our fashionable young man of Bond Street, who, depending mainly on his grand alliance with tailors and bootmakers, sets out to conquer the World-the young man who actually appears to have come to the conclusion that the tailor maketh the man, even he, in his superlative insignificance, possesses, I believe, an emotional faculty in his soul which would be capable of yielding spiritual music to himself if he would only give it a fair chance of making the acquaintance of Nature. To the merely cartilaginous ear, of course, the piping of Pan will for ever remain inaudible. That organ is better fitted to appreciate the strains of the Barrel-Organ. 26. To make the most of it, the esthetic faculty must be carefully cultivated.-Another point: have concluded that the generality of men are more or less richly or poorly endowed with the esthetical faculty, just as they are more or less richly or poorly endowed with the other mental and moral faculties, and just as they are all, more or less, furnished with bodily organs and potentialities. Query: How do you make the best of your corporeal organs? By steadily training and exercising them, of course, and by constant and 1 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,' Vol. viii. p. 828. Perhaps he meant Prophet to include Poet? careful treatment of them. How, on the other hand, do you weaken or destroy them? By neglect, undoubtedly, and by abuse or intemperance of any kind. So is it with your management of the higher faculties. As expressed by Aristotle: "We get the virtues by having first performed the energies, as is the case also in all the other arts; for those things which we must do after having learned them, we learn to do by doing them; as, for example, by building houses men become builders, and by playing on the harp, harpers; thus also, by doing just actions we become just; by performing temperate actions, temperate; and by performing brave actions, we become brave." 1 On the reverse view of the case the poet Cowper moralises most admirably : "Pleasure admitted in undue degree Enslaves the will, nor leaves the judgment free. Of some ungoverned passion every hour, Finds by degrees the truths that once bore sway So coin grows smooth in traffic current passed, We all know, sadly know, that there are millions of wooden heads in the world, and millions of 'Nic. Ethics,' ii. 1, 4. How mind and heart act and react on each other, see Carlyle, Essays,' Vol. iii. p. 57 (Cent. Edition). How practice improves taste, see Hume, Essays Moral,' &c., Vol. i. pp. 275, 278. Here also, in contradiction of what he has previously said (see above, note, p. 95), he allows that "the general principles of taste are uniform in Human Nature; that where men vary in their judgments, some perversion or defect in the faculties may commonly be remarked, proceeding either from prejudice, from want of practice, or want of delicacy; and there is just reason for approving one taste and condemning another (Ib., p. 280)—a passage worthy of a philosopher. Notice that in this fine passage he happily forgets his helpless theory of "impressions and ideas," and wisely accepts the Common-Sense as the proper basis of esthetic theory. 24 The Progress of Error.' 66 very stony hearts. But why? Through bad management of heart and head. Treat a piano or an organ very badly, knock a fiddle about or drive nails with it, crack a flute, and I need scarcely say that you will at least impair, if not wholly destroy, their musical potentialities; and surely it will be similar with the Human Heart and the Human Head. Let a man or a woman's Heart be given to trifles, and it will become more and more wooden every day. Let a man's heart be given to avarice or gambling, and it will probably become almost incapable of responding to any generous or tender or gracious influence. If the great Vulgar continue their demand for " penny merriments,' how can they become wise and noble ? But tune the Heart and the Head carefully; guard them sacredly-seeing that they are deserving of nothing less than the most sacred guardianship; cherish Heart and Head as faculties committed to your care by Heaven; cultivate them, listen to them, and do not doubt that you will hear the sacred melodies. 27. These are the cautions, then, which I wish to offer-namely, that whilst our emotional capacities and faculties are all the same in kind, they may yet vary very widely in quality and degree of responsiveness in each person: firstly, through their original strength or weakness in the individual to whom they belong; they belong; and secondly, through the good or bad treatment which they may have received from him. 28. Ethics and Esthetics are independent of common utilitarian and extrinsic considerations.-Finally, notice also the native and intrinsic value and significance of the esthetic judgment-that, like the ethical judgment, it distinguishes truth and falsehood, qualities and defects in its objects, independently of, and apart from, all merely utilitarian and extrinsic considerations. 29. The greatest teachers of Philosophy and Religion. The greatest teachers of Philosophy and Religion are those who best analyse, expound, synthesise, and balance our various faculties (corporeal and mental), and set forth the needs and wants of Human Nature as a whole. The intuitional or noetic deliverances of these faculties are the Data and the First Principles of all rational application and illustration. Let me repeat Reid's great dictum-a dictum which should be emblazoned on the walls of all the colleges: "It is the perfection of a rational being to have no belief but what is founded on intuitive evidence or just reasoning." 111 CHAPTER V. TRUTH TO NATURE IN LITERATURE AND ART. 1. Recapitulation.-We have now, I hope, cleared the ground to some extent, and laid a kind of foundation for the discussion of esthetical principles in their application to the works both of Literature and Art. We have seen what confusion and contrariety of opinion reign among the critics even as to what Poetry actually means; we have, as it were, paid a visit to the natural sources of Poetry, and tried to indicate the current of its waters; we have vindicated and assigned to every adult and sane person the right and privilege of analysing these waters for himself, and of testing their purity by his own esthetic palate, nothing doubting that when he has honestly exercised those rights and privileges, the esthetic judgment which he forms will be found to harmonise with those of other men who have duly exercised the same rights and privileges. 2. The Source of Articulate Poetry.-In support of the doctrine that the esthetical or emotional faculties are common to men, I quoted Emerson's saying that "All men All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world even to delight." To these words he makes the expansive addition : Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it |