and moral value of Greek art, as well as its fine esthetic quality, that gives supreme importance to its works; and the same thing holds true of English, Italian and French literature. Contemplation without judgment is a barren attitude. It is not necessary that judgment should be of the comparative rank of this or that, higher or lower, or of its legitimacy or illegitimacy. Judgment is not of one sort, but various; it may not even be explicit, but may reside in the degree and quality of the pleasure or pain felt in the presence of art; but, whatever be its particular subject or mode of statement, some judgment disclosing the worth of the work of art seems to me not only appropriate, but an essential part of the critic's service. If art is to be known historically — and that is clearly the meaning of the injunction to re-create works of art as they were in the minds of the original maker then criticism must be both historical and judicial; it must re-create the past in environment and temperament, and it must analyze the contents of art, in any particular case, to discover its worth.

The revolt against historical and judicial criticism, the attempt to confine the critic to an act of contemplation or simple intuition and whatever may result from that in his mind, in the belief that he will thus repeat what was in the mind of the artist, springs, I think, from a discontent with that immersion in the dead past of knowledge which is often the scholar's lot, and from a desire to confine our interest in art within those limits where art is alive. I sympathize with this discontent and this desire. It is true that in historical criticism the mind travels far from the work of art itself, and makes a long detour through biography and social and political history; and often it arrives at its true task

only through linguistics and archeology. This is wearisome, especially if one is really interested in art and letters. It is true also that in analyzing the contents of epic and drama, tales of chivalry, Eastern fables and Northern sagas, the mind is dealing often with dead intellect and dead morals, with antiquated methods, with what was inchoate in the primitive and decaying in the overripe; in a word, with what belongs in the tomb, from which as a matter of fact much of it comes. But that is the lot of the scholar. "My days among the dead are passed," is the inscription over his Inferno. But if one insists on re-creating in his own mind precisely what was in the mind of the original artist — or, since that is confessedly hopeless, on approximating that ideal as closely as possible then, I see no help for it. History is a thing of the dead past. It is an embalmment, wearing a mummified resemblance to life. Many are the voices in our time, beginning with Emerson, that have cried, "Away with it!" "Let us sweep our houses clean of death," they say, "and have only life for a housemate." There is a group of young men in Italy who advocate the destruction of the art of the past there; they say that it is in the way. If anything in the past is worth preserving, surely it is the history of the soul, and if any history is worth knowing, it is that history. Any pains that any scholar may be put to, in acquiring that knowledge, is worth while; but, after all, death enters also into the history of the soul, and much that is recorded there is no longer vital, no longer of this world. Yet it is true in realizing the dead selves of mankind, the soul accumulates power, breadth of outlook, tolerance and especially, I think, faith and hope. The scholar who accumulates in himself the human past

has something of that wisdom which goes, in individual life, with a long memory. This is the service of historical criticism, that it stores and vivifies memory: it is a great service, and I would not dispense with it; but, especially in the world of art, which is the most intense realm of life, one is often fain to ask "Is there no rescue from this reign of death, which is history, and how shall it be accomplished?"

II

ESTHETIC CRITICISM

Is it an error to relegate art to the dead past and translate it into history? Works of art are not like political events and persons; they do not pass at once away. The Hermes of Praxiteles is still with us. Is it really the same Hermes that it was when it was made? Is its personal identity a fixed state, or does its personality, like our own, change in the passage of time? May it not be the nature of art to cast off what is mortal, and emancipate itself from the mind of its creator? Is it truly immortal, still alive, or only a stone image forever the same-a petrifaction, as it were, of the artist's soul at a certain moment? or is it possible, on the other hand, that such a life really abides in art as to make what is immortal in the work greatly exceed that mortal and temporary part which historical criticism preserves? Let us ignore the historical element, and consider what is left in the critical act, still conceived as a re-creation of the image, but the re-creation of the image before us apart from any attempt to realize what was in the artist's mind, or with only a passing reference to that.

Expression is the nucleus of the artist's power. What is expression? It is the process of externalizing what was in the artist's mind, in some object of sense which shall convey it to others. The material used may be

actual form and color, as in painting and sculpture; or imaginary objects and actions through the medium of language, as in literature; or pure sound, as in music: always there is some material which is perceived by the senses and intelligible only through their mediation. Slight, indeed, would be the artist's power and inept his skill, if he should not so frame the lineaments of his work as to stamp on the senses of all comers the same intelligible image, and give for the bodily eye what the bodily eye can see in picture, statue or story. The work of art, however, is not merely the material object, but that object charged with the personality of the artist. It is in his power to make that charge effective that his true faculty of expression lies. The material object - form, color, action, sound is enveloped in his feeling; the words he uses are loaded with his meanings and tones. His personality is immaterial, and cannot be bodied forth; hence, the most essential and significant part of what he expresses, that which clothes the material object with its spirituality, is dependent in a supreme degree on suggestion, on what can be only incompletely set forth, on half-lights and intimations, and the thousand subtleties which lie on the borderland of the inexpressible.

In so far as a work of art is a thing of nature, it can be expressed materially with the more adequacy; in so far as it is a thing of the spirit, of personality, it is less subject to complete and certain expression; and in all art there are these two elements. In that process of re-creating the image which we are now examining the mind's fortune with these two elements is unequal; so far as the material part is concerned, normal eyes will see the same thing, normal intelligence will grasp the same thing,