the moment. This is an extreme case, but not unexampled in the history of the world. Party-rage brands opponents with the most unheard-of crimes; the term calumny only expresses this surplus of accusation against those that have roused the passion of hate.

25. The purely Egotistic feelings are remarkable for the superstructure of imaginative creations that they can rear. Self-complacency suggests merits and virtues, and constructs an estimate of self most flattering. Vanity sets up pictures of admiring assemblies and devoted worshippers. But most curious of all are the day-dreams of ambition in a sanguine temperament; these will embrace a whole history of the future, the baseless fabric of a vision of wonders and triumphs, which is not only constructed without labour, but whose construction no labour can arrest. In former sections we have adverted to the difficult efforts of constructiveness; we have seen how hard it often is to comply with the numerous conditions that a construction must fulfil, or to give a place for all the ingredients that should be represented in it; so much so that the attempt may have to be repeated time after time, before everything will fall into the proper place. A scientific man framing a definition for a very comprehensive class of objects, a mechanician constructing a new machine, a politician devising a state expedient, a general circumventing a hostile army, will be each engaged in deliberations, for days or months, ere the proper combination occur to the mind. One suggestion includes something to be avoided, another omits something that ought to be present, and long delays and repeated substitutions and trials precede the successful termination of the struggle. But in the case now supposed, all is different: stupendous constructiveness, unbounded originality, flow out at once as fast as thought can evolve itself. Wherein lies the remarkable difference in these two forms of constructiveness? The immortal crockery merchant constructed, in a few minutes, a lengthened fiction, totally distinct from anything he had ever seen realized in actual life. Why has emotion such power? The answer is simple. A predominating emotion, such as ambition, is every day at work associating

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itself with objects and incidents suited to gratify it. The feeling is called into play by every spectacle of power and grandeur that meets the eye, or is presented in story. The associating link is soon forged in the hot fire of passion; and, after months and years of indulgence of a favourite emotion, a rich growth of the corresponding objects and ideas is formed and ready to flow out at any moment when the feeling is roused. Imagination, in those circumstances, becomes a power needing restraint, rather than an effort of laboured constructiveness. The foregone associations with the feeling are so copious that they present themselves freely for any purpose. Construction is easy where materials are abundant and the conditions few: the owner of the crockery basket had amassed pictures of happiness and grandeur, which required only to be cast into a consecutive order to make his epic, and an extempore effort was enough for this. The only thing he wanted was to satisfy one feeling, all restrictions were thrown aside, and he had plenty of images to suit the single emotion that lorded it over his dream. Very different would have been the pace of his execution, if he had insisted that this foreshadowing of his career should be in accordance with the stern experience of human life; if his picture should have been regulated by natural calculation founded on actual observation. This would have dried up his facility in a moment; he would then have been in the contrasting position above described, of the man of science, or the man of business; a feeling might have still been the end, but purely intellectual estimates of the facts and laws of the world would have entered into his construction of the means. The reconciliation of his desires with the resources of his position would have been as arduous as a string of airy successes was facile. The process might have ever so much of the constructive intellect, and the combination might have been never so original, but the term 'imagination' would no longer be used to describe it.

26. The Fine Art emotions properly so called, the emotions. of harmony, beauty, sublimity, picturesqueness, pathos, humour, become associated in the artistic mind with the objects that radiate the influence on the beholder, and from the materials

thus stored up and reproduced by association the artist makes his constructions. I have in a former chapter (Contiguity,

75) adverted to the mental equipment suitable to the artist in any department; and it is scarcely necessary to repeat, what I have endeavoured to illustrate throughout the present chapter, that when all the elements are present that fit into a particular construction they will take their places as a matter of course. The labour consists in getting up the constituent parts from the repositories of the mind, and in choosing and rejecting until the end in view is completely answered. Because the imaginations of a dreamer are easy and fluent, it does not follow that the imaginations of a musician, an architect, or a poet, shall be equally easy, although in principle the same, being governed by an emotion powerfully developed and richly associated with material. The artist has more stringent conditions to fulfil than the dreamer. He has to satisfy the reigning feeling of his piece, the melody, harmony, pathos, humour, of the composition; he has also to make this effect apparent to the minds of others; he has moreover to exclude many effects discordant to the taste of his audience; and if his work be the decoration of some object of common usefulness, he has to save the utilities while in search of the amenities. Every new restriction adds to the difficulty of a combining effort; and an artist may be so trammelled with conditions, that the exercise of imagination shall be rendered as laborious as any construction of the reason. To call up combinations that produce powerful and rich effects upon the minds of men is not easy in any art; but the gathered abundance of the artistic intellect is the secret of the power. The more rich the granary of material, the more is the artist prepared to submit to the numerous conditions involved in a really great performance.

27. I do not purpose at present to enter upon a minute. illustration of the mental processes of art-construction. Not only would a large space be requisite for spreading out the examples in detail, but there would soon come to be involved a strenuous polemical discussion in consequence of the prevalence of theories of art that seem to me erroneous. Con

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ceiving as I do that the first object of an artist is to gratify the feelings of taste, or the proper æsthetic emotions, I cannot assent to the current maxim that nature is his standard, or truth his chief end. On the contrary, I believe that these are precisely the conditions of the scientific man; he it is that should never deviate from nature, and who should care for truth before all other things. The artist's standard is feeling, his end is refined pleasure; he goes to nature and selects what chimes in with his feelings of artistic effect, and passes by the rest. He is not even bound to adhere to nature in her very choicest displays; his own taste being the touchstone, he alters the originals at his will. The scientific man, on the other hand, must embrace every fact with open arms; the most nauseous fungus, the most loathsome reptile, the most pestilential vapour, must be scanned and set forth in all its details.

The amount of regard that the artist owes to truth, so far as I am able to judge, is nearly as follows. In the purely effusive arts, such as music or the dance, truth and nature are totally irrelevant; the artist's feeling and the gratification of the senses of mankind generally are the sole criterion of the -effect. So in the fancies of decorative art, nature has very little place; suggestions are occasionally derived from natural objects, but no one is bound to adopt more of these than good taste may allow. Nobody talks of the design of a calico as being true to nature; it is enough if it please the eye. 'Art is art because it is not nature.' The artist provides dainties not to be found in nature. There are, however, certain departments of art that differ considerably from music and fanciful decoration, in this respect, namely, that the basis of the composition is generally something actual, or something derived from the existing realities of nature or life. Such are painting, poetry, and romance. In these, nature gives the subject, and the artistic genius the adornment. Now, although in this case also the gratification of the senses and the æsthetic sensibilities is still the aim of the artist, he has to show a certain decent respect to our experience of reality in the management of his subject, that not being purely imaginary,

like the figures of a calico, but chosen from the world of reality. Hence when a painter lays hold of the human figure in order to display his harmonies of colour and beauties of form and picturesqueness of grouping, he ought not to shock our feeling of truth and consistency by a wide departure from the usual proportions of humanity. We don't look for anatomical exactness; we know that the studies of an artist do not imply the knowledge of a professor of anatomy; but we expect that the main features of reality shall be adhered to. In like manner, a poet is not great because he exhibits human nature with literal fidelity; to do that would make the reputation of a historian or a mental philosopher. The poet is great by his metres, his cadences, his images, his picturesque groupings, his graceful narrative, his exaltation of reality into the region of ideality; and if in doing all this he avoid serious mistakes or gross exaggerations, he passes without rebuke, and earns the unqualified honours of his genius.

28. The attempt to reconcile the artistic with the true,art with nature,—has given birth to a middle school, in whose productions a restraint is put upon the flights of pure imagination, and which claims the merit of informing the mind as to the realities of the world, while gratifying the various æsthetic emotions. Instead of the tales of Fairy-land, the Arabian nights, the Romances of chivalry, we have the modern novelist with his pictures of living men and manners. In painting we have natural scenery, buildings, men, and animals represented with scrupulous exactness. The sculptor and the painter exercise the vocation of producing portraits that shall hand down to future ages the precise lineaments of the men and women of their generation. Hence the study of nature has become an element in artistic education; and the artist often speaks as if the exhibition of truth were his prime endeavour and his highest honour. It is probably this attempt to subject imagination to the conditions of truth and reality that has caused the singular transference above mentioned, whereby the definition of science has been made the definition of art.

Now I have every desire to do justice to the merits of the truth-seeking artist. Indeed the importance of the reconcili