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whether they treat of Greek gods, like Dionysus, or French gallants, or Roman gentlemen; all his figures are developed in the dark chamber of his own singularly sensitive and refined artistic temperament. The same phenomenon occurs as characteristically, though in so contrasted a way, in the Puritan rehabilitation of the Old Testament at the time of the Civil War, when Agag and Naboth and their lives served as the eternal pattern of the ideal for the Roundheads; and at the present day one often hears in orthodox churches a discourse which, so far as its figures and colors are concerned, always reminds me of antique tapestry and seems to belong to some Oriental art of expression rather than to our own tongue, manners and ideas. Literature, and indeed all art, has this magic to change the meaning without altering the signs. It was thus that the picturesque and mythologic side of Paganism, the poetic part, was taken up, absorbed and reëmbodied in the Catholicism of southern Europe, and lives to this day, little changed in outward seeming, by the old Mediterranean shores. Indeed, in much modern poetry I often find the necessity of translating the old signs into fresh meanings in order to keep the language alive to me. Poetic imagery is none too abundant, take it all together; we cannot afford to sacrifice much of it. Instead of abolish ing battle and the wine-cup, the gods and the heroes, the Old Testament, and what not, it will be far wiser to use them in the service of our new ideals. Art, taken either as a language or in its individual works, has not one meaning, but many. This is a part of the poet's subtle mystery that he declares he knows not what.

If you have followed these remarks with any sympathy and I have conveyed to you my belief that each

of us has the artist-soul, continually engaged in its own creations, you will readily comprehend that works of art are not to me historical monuments valuable for the information they give of the past, nor even artistic entities to be known apart from ourselves and as they were in the artist's mind; but rather such works are only raw material, or at least new material, for us to make our own statues and pictures and poems out of; or, in a word, to create the forms of our own souls out of; for the soul must be given forms in order to be aware of its being, to know itself, truly to be. The soul moves toward self-expression in many ways, but in finding forms for itself the soul discovers its most plastic material in the world of art. It is in forms of ideality that the soul hastens to clothe itself; and while it is possible for us to elaborate such forms from the crude mass of nature, as the first artists did, yet later generations are the more fortunate in that they possess in art and literature a vast treasure of ideality already elaborated and present. Works of art thus constitute a select material wherein the artist-soul that is in each of us can work, not only with our own native force of penetration and aspiration, but, as it were, with higher aid — the aid of genius, the aid of the select souls of the race. It is true that the re-creation of old art which we accomplish is our own personal act, and cannot be otherwise; but the way is made easier for us, doors are opened, directions are indicated, light is shed on forward and unknown paths, sympathy, guidance and courage are given to us by companionship with the works of those, our forerunners, who have lived long in the soul's own world and left their testimony for us so far as we have skill to read in their text and understand in their spirit.

This is the true service of art-of the poets, painters, musicians — to prepare the material of the soul's life so that those who are less fortunately endowed and more humble may more readily put on the spiritual garment that all must wear if they are to be souls, indeed, and live above the bodily sphere. There are other ways than art, it is true, by which the soul comes into its own; but in the way of art it is by re-creating in ourselves the past forms of the spirit, vitally appropriating them and charging them with our own life, that we win most directly and happily to true self-knowledge of the wonderful creature that man is.

It has become plain, I trust, in what sense it is indeed true that it is the nature of art to cast off what is mortal and emancipate itself from the mind of its creator, and thus to enter upon a life of its own, continually renewed in the minds of those who appropriate it. This is its real immortality-not the fact that it lasts through time, but that it lives in the souls of mankind. I am fond of biography, and few are the pleasures of the literary life that are more pure and precious than the quiet and unknown companionship which biography may establish between ourselves and those whose works have endeared to us their persons and interested us in their human fortunes as if they were friends; but I am always glad when time has destroyed all merely mortal record of them, and there remains only their work - only the "souls of poets dead and gone." It is only when fame shrinks to that narrow limit of the book or the deed, that it rises to its height. The Greek Anthology is a book of pure immortality because it has brought down with it so little of the alloy of temporal personality; and that clarity of fame, which seems almost a pecul

iarity of classical literature and antique art, gathering all its luster often into one lonely name, is due, perhaps, most to this freedom from human detail. The poet, the sculptor, has come to live only in his work, where the immortal part of him found expression and lodgment while he was yet alive; all else was dust, and is in the tomb which is appointed for mortal things. It is better so, when the poet's memory itself becomes ideal, and the imagination paints its Dante and carves its Shelley after the image of the pure soul they left on earth when they departed hence. Even that soul, that personality which they incarnated in their art, suffers changes and refinement. Only that element abides which can enter continuously and permanently into the souls of men, according to their several grades of being-only that which can live in humanity; the rest fades away with time. And then this miracle arises that into the soul of Virgil, for example, enters a Christian soul, new-born, and deepening its pathos; and not Virgil only, but many others, are, as it were, adopted into the race itself and become the ever growing children of the human spirit, ideals and fathers of ideals through ages. That is earthly immortality- the survival and increment of the spirit through time. Thus arises another paradox, that as art begins by being charged with personality, it ends by becoming impersonal, solving the apparent contradiction in the soul universal, the common soul of mankind. Each of us creates art in his own image it seems an infinite variable; and yet it is the variable of something identical in all the soul. I often think that in the artistic life, and its wonderful spiritual interchange through the re-creation in each of the ideals of all, there is realized something analogous to the religious concep

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to your ordinary memory of things; new powers of feeling have opened in your heart that constitute a fresh passion of life there, and as you feel it with lyric and drama, a significance, a mystery, a light enter into the universe as you know it, with transforming and exalting power. To the lover of pictures the visible world has become something other than it was even nature herself flowers with Corots and Manets, coruscates with Turners and Claudes, darkens with Rembrandts; to the lover of poetry also the visible world has suffered change and lies in the light of Wordsworth or of Shelley, but much more the invisible world of inward life is transformed into visions of human fate in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, into throbs of passion in Dante and Petrarch, into cries of esctasy and pain in how many generations of the poets world-wide. It is not that you have acquired knowledge; you have acquired heart. To lead the artistlife is not to look at pictures and read books; it is to discover the faculties of the soul, that slept unknown and unused, and to apply them in realizing the depth and tenderness, the eloquence, the hope and joy, of the life that is within. It is by this that the life of art differs from the life of science: its end is not to know, but to be. The revolt against the historical treatment of art arises from feeling that in such treatment art loses its own nature, and that what is truly life, and has its only value as life, is degraded into what is merely knowledge. I appreciate the worth and function of knowledge, and join with Tennyson in recognition of her rightful realm, but add with him—

"Let her know her place;

She is the second, not the first."

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