tolerant, I consent nevertheless that literary drummers and commercial bagmen, whose time is so precious, should take to the railway and carry their samples and their idiocy from one place to another as rapidly as they may, but for Heaven's sake, give us leave to stroll quietly along as our thoughts lead us, by the bank of streams, through mead and copse, now stopping to pluck a daisy wet with dew, now to listen to the blackbird's song, deserting the highway for remoter paths, and doing just as we please. Write prose as much as you like, but let others write verse; plant potatoes, but do not pull up tulips; fatten geese, but do not wring the necks of nightingales, and remember that stout Martin Luther familiarly remarked that he who loves not wine, women, and song is a fool and will be a fool to the end of his days. In spite of all your pretensions you are imperfect, and can understand one side of man only. You fancy that happiness consists in properly cooked beefsteaks and sound electoral laws. I think highly of both these things, but comfort is not enough; every select organisation must have art, must have beauty, must have form. That is the garment God has woven with His own hands to cover the world's nudity.

Unhappily this is no new debate, and this is not the first time that mathematicians, on reading Racine, have asked: "What does this demonstrate?" No one can expect the deaf to enjoy music, and the blind may chatter at their ease on the superfluity or non-existence of colour.

CIVILISATION AND THE

PLASTIC ARTS

THE IDEAL OF BEAUTY IN ANCIENT AND IN MODERN TIMES

A

RTISTS often complain of the ugliness of modern civilisation. According to them, the Beautiful, a product of the civilisation of antiquity, has not survived it, and, save for the period called Renaissance, which was a reaction in the direction of Greek and Roman ideas, the feeling for form has almost completely disappeared from this earth.

I shall not here enter upon lengthy æsthetic dissertations upon the meaning of the word Beautiful, which is a thing more easily comprehended than demonstrated. I shall be content with Plato's definition: The Beautiful is the splendour of the True.

Civilisation, which sprang up in India, traversed Egypt and settled in Greece. It manifested itself first by a monstrous, multiple symbolism, that next assumed hieratic stiffness, and was brought back to the types of taste by the eminently artistic Hellenic race.

Civilisation acted as does nature, which invariably passes from the complex to the simple, from the misshapen to the beautiful. The notion of a god with an elephant's trunk and polyp-like arms, precedes the Jupiter of Phidias just as the mammoth precedes the horse.

Economy of material and harmony of lines, that is the end aimed at by perfection. To make much out of little is the object of nature, and should be that of art. Greek and Latin antiquity, with its anthropomorphistic polytheism, possessed in the highest degree the feeling for form; the human body, under which the gods. were represented, became the object of positive worship; statuary attained to the highest degree of splendour, and in this respect, to the shame of progress be it said, it may be affirmed that art has not advanced one step for more than two thousand years.

There are many who go so far as to believe that it has retrograded.

Now, is it true that from the point of view of the Beautiful modern times are inferior to the times of antiquity, as is maintained, and in any case, what can be the cause of such a degenerescence?

The substitution of Christian for pagan ideas appears to me to be the primary cause of this degradation of form.

ART AND CRITICISM

Formerly the human body, set up as the type of the Beautiful, as being the highest development of the configuration of matter, was the ideal regulator of artistic conceptions. And, indeed, the mind cannot imagine a more perfect form than that of man. The Greeks referred everything to this prototype, which assumed, in their hands, the most harmonious proportions; architecture, ceramics, were inspired by its lines, and the poet could say of the Propylaea that their outline bloomed "as with the beauty of a human smile."

The pillars of the Parthenon offer to the caress of the glance the graceful curves of a maiden's form, and the amphoræ recall, in their handles, the arms of women raised above the head to loosen the hair or upbear a basket. The merit of the Greeks in poetry and art is that they ever preserved human proportions. As they tended to this ideal, the purest and surest of all, they easily attained to Beauty, and transformed matter into a really divine thing.

Christianity, which sprang from Essenian and Jewish doctrines, was far from experiencing the same passionate love for form. The Hebrews, as is well known, proscribe images that is the plastic arts under the pretext that they conduce to idolatry, and the Jewish