"

of life for ever. The progress of Christian art is as the Greek art towards a complete conquest of the universe -to find beauty not in gods and heroes only, but in all levels of existence. It does this, however, always with the consciousness that its effort is doomed to fail, that it is less than the reality, that it is in the unseen and the spiritual that the chief beauty dwells by art. This very sense of deficiency, however, leads it to be persevering beyond all Greek art in presentation of reality, and of any atom of reality that can be made to have any artistic interest at all. And the "soothfastness of a story comes to be part of its charm and its claim to immortality, as the Scottish poet thought.1 So Giotto painted fewer pictures for devotion and more for the intelligence, setting down things in their reality. So Dante portrayed each man he met in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise without regard to anything but the nature of the man before him not being interested in anything more than in the true nature of the man, to whom the doom passed on him is an external thing. There was a separation imminent between religion and art when it was possible to treat calmly of low human things unblinded by the light of theology. There was no disappearance of religion. The Norse religion grew weak in proportion as Norse culture and art and knowledge of humanity grew. But the Christian religion was stronger than this, it could not pass away into the art. There was a separation for a time of spiritual religion from art, as there was a separation of philosophy from both. Art was left to go its own way. It ceased, as philosophy ceased, to be merely the interpreter of Christian tradition. It expressed in its own way, as philosophy expressed in its own way, the 1 Barbour, Bruce, at the beginning.

idea of Christianity, that it is the individual subject which is of infinite value. The music which is the creation of the modern world expresses that which is inexpressible in all other arts-the mind's freedom from the contingency of the outward world and obedience to its own law.

XXXIV

IMAGINATION AND JUDGMENT

THE writings of the moralists are full of passages showing the vanity and the cruelty of imagination; and the antithesis of imagination and judgment is found in ordinary use, to bring out the hazards of a particular type of mind. "Too much imagination and too little judgment "-it applies to the sanguine and optimistic man of business, to the hot-headed soldier, to all the great race of borrowers, all those who are ready to pledge their future, who believe what they wish to be true. Even the whole human race comes under this description, in many sermons on the Vanity of Human Wishes:

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat,

Yet fool'd with hope men favour the deceit ;
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.

Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain ;
And from the dregs of life think to receive

What the first sprightly running could not give.

I'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold,

Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.

Between the idle imagination that will not take proper account of circumstances, will not see things as they are, and the heated imagination that overestimates all values (with or without the delusive help of poetry) there are plenty of opportunities for the moralists, and there is little need for quotation. But one exceptional passage may be quoted, because it illustrates a remarkable diversion from the common track of the moralist; a passage in which Wordsworth eloquently and fervently recites a number of cases of illustration and exaggeration, not in order to display the weaknesses of human nature, but to derive hope and encouragement from the very thought of its passions:

The history of all ages; tumults after tumults; wars; foreign or civil, with short or no breathing spaces, from generation to generation; wars-why and wherefore? yet with courage, with perseverance, with self-sacrifice, with enthusiasm-with cruelty driving forward the cruel man from its own terrible nakedness and attracting the more benign by the accompaniment of some shadow which seems to sanctify it; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions vanishing and reviving and piercing each other like the Northern Lights; public commotions and those in the bosom of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject; the blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially through a frightful solitude of his own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening but ever quickening descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghostlike hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life distemper of ambition; these inward existences and the visible and familiar occurrences of daily life in every town and village; the patient curiosity and contagious acclamations of the multitude in the streets of the city and within the walls of the theatre; a procession, or a rural dance; a hunting, or a horse-race; a flood, or a fire; rejoicing and ringing of bells for an unexpected gift

of good fortune, or the coming of a foolish heir to his estate these demonstrate incontestably that the passions of men (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man) in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them do immeasurably transcend their object.1

This flaming sentence might easily be taken as an exposure and indictment of human frailty and folly, and there is certainly no need for any increase in the vehemence of its tone. But the moral which Wordsworth wished here to enforce is not the old one, and his vehemence is not intended as denunciation:

The true sorrow consists in this, not that the mind of man fails; but that the course and demands of action and of life do rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires; and hence that, which is slow to languish, is too easily turned aside and abused.

Men are ennobled, that is, by their passionate and imaginative courage and perseverance even when they may be throwing themselves away on vanities. Men are frequently stronger than sound judgment would allow them to be, says Wordsworth, in effect. The object of his political tract was to prove the importance of the Spanish ring, and he supports his case proving the motive strength of illusion. You might think that the Spaniards would see their true interest in yielding to the French; but no! it is just as likely, from general principles of human nature, that they will make a heroic defence against the invader. Heroism is just as natural as cowardice, passionate strength is just as natural and just as common as timidity. Passion may be either good or evil, and Wordsworth in his torrent of examples takes no pains to choose 1 Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra.