his personal life as that life is already embodied in his face and his hands. And when from this point of view he recalls the original "practical purpose" it seems now that the practical purpose represented only a schematic outline of life, workable indeed, yet from the standpoint of life itself a kind of caricature, and related to life much as a saw-horse is related to a real horse or as the painter's manikin is related to what he will express with his brush.

This means, again, that from utility to beauty is a passage from the dumb, relatively speaking, to the consciously articulate. Art, as Croce says, is expression. This element of expression will be clearer if from the practical man's writing-table we turn our attention to his coat. When a man says, A coat is for me a matter of pure utility, and therefore I consider nothing but price, durability, and warmth, it means either that he forgets or that he will deny that the clothes express the man. The fact, that a man is indeed known by his clothes, he can hardly deny. He may condemn the fact as standing for an artificial association; but then he may have to explain why the use of c-a-t to indicate a certain soft furry animal with claws is not the product of an association even more artificial. When the consciousness of expression is borne home to him it seems that, simply as an honest man, he is faced with a problem; which is now indistinguishably an aesthetic and a moral problem. He may seek to evade the problem by wearing only the most neutral of coats. But hardly with success. It does not indeed follow that a severely plain choice in matters of dress and household equipage marks an insensibility to beauty; it may mark only a mute rejection, despairing or contemptuous, of the satisfactions available. But any attitude whatever implies

a certain judgment, which is both moral and aesthetic, upon the values represented in the current conceptions of life.

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Finally it will be said on behalf of the separateness of beauty and virtue, but mainly now for the protection of art and beauty, that it is not the function of art to teach moral lessons. But neither, if I am right, is this the function of moral philosophy. And here I think we have the root of the whole matter: the separation of beauty and virtue is inspired mainly by a fear of that authoritarian conception of morality which defines virtue as right conduct and makes it the function of ethics to "teach".

Yet, though it is not the artist's function to teach, it is surely his function to express; and if not moral lessons, then impressions, conceptions, appreciations of life; and thus to express what is in the most significant sense moral. If moral philosophy is a study of life, I think we must find in art and literature, and most clearly in poetry and fiction, its most important experimental laboratory; and to me a study of the aims and motives of literary criticism reveals far more adequately than most of the treatises on ethics the distinctive logic and motif of the "moral" world. There is indeed a superficial literary criticism which is concerned with style-and a more superficial study of literature which, seeking to be accounted scientific, calls itself philology. But the style is after all the man. the fundamental peculiarity of any distinctively "literary" treatment of a subject that which makes it seem so trivial and unworthy to any properly scientific mind—is just that it tends to regard the form and even the subjectmatter of any writing as somewhat less interesting than the

And

mind and personality of the writer himself. And thus the really critical question for literary criticism becomes the question of the man himself and his outlook upon life.

I have referred above to the Carlylean "strong man". When we "study Carlyle" the chief point of interest is-just Carlyle. In his "Heroes", in "Frederick the Great", in the Abbot Samson of "Past and Present" he has given us Carlyle's own ideal of man; and what is more, a comprehensive view of what he conceives to be worth while in human life. His style is a subject for dispute. But this is only to say that Carlyle is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that the style is the man. So long as you find a suggestion of worth and greatness in his presentation of life you will find him eloquent and impressive; and while he remains eloquent he remains significant. If this impression is dissipated his eloquence becomes tirade.

Likewise of Dickens. What makes "David Copperfield" to most persons the most impressive of his novels is the fact that there clearly you have Dickens himself. In his characters and in their difficulties the writer of fiction reveals his personal conception of the problem of life. If you are a lover of Dickens and rank him as in some manner a true artist it means that in the sober middleclass ideals that stand forth in his pages and in his sympathetic handling of lower-class life you find some of the value and essence of genuine humanity; and if you dismiss him as a sentimentalist, it means that you question the significance of middle and lower-class virtue. I suppose, again, that Arthur Pendennis is largely Thackeray himself Thackeray taking himself humorously yet none the less offering an apologia. Pendennis, I fancy, is just the sort of decent, wholesome, yet withal clever and in

telligent young Englishman most congenial to Thackeray's taste. He is not quite a man of genius, and he is no hero; but this only means that Thackeray has no very high appreciation of heroes-a moral estimate, be it noted, in which there will be others to agree with him.

Granting that seemingly great artists are sometimes seemingly the most immoral of men-seemingly, I mean, for the first look-it will be no less true that the final estimate of the art will coincide closely with the final estimate of the man. One cannot remain for long an admirer of Villon and also a Puritan moralist. Nor, again, will Tolstoi's four volumes of "War and Peace" remain an artistic monstrosity for one who has come to share Tolstoi's belief in a mystical humanity, the life of which is revealed not in the passing acts of individuals but in the slower movements of nations and races; by one, in other words, whose moral ideal for the individual is self-effacement and absorption of self into humanity. For my own part, though I find Balzac's novels fascinating and compelling when once I am past the beginning, I cannot rate him as the great artist that his admirers usually find in him; and mainly because to my taste his slavish admiration of the manners of high life casts a blemish of vulAnd I have little ap

garity upon nearly every scene. preciation of the much-praised "art" of de Maupassant because it seems to me that his "effects", so far from indicating either breadth or depth of experience of life, are just the customary shallow tricks of the newspaper featurewriter. On the other hand, I am disposed to rate Tourgenieff as a very great artist because I seem to find in him (possibly indeed because I know him to have been a serious student of philosophy) a background of gravity

and brooding contemplation, a sense of the tragic complexity of all human motive, which gives suggestiveness to the simplest of his sketches of Russian country life and to his revolutionists, such as Basarof and Roudine, a significance almost Shakespearian.

Any of these judgments of mine may be disputed. But it will be found, I think, that the ground of the dispute will include the moral ground. It will be claimed that I have wrongly estimated not merely the artist but the man.