nor time to spare. And perhaps only one monument exists where, above the ruin and desolation wrought by time and by restorers, the image of this grand old Titan still rises unsubdued; and this, unhappily, is at Padua, a city, indeed, of wonderful charm and beauty, but cast into comparative shade by the dazzling pre-eminence of her too near neighbour Venice. The decoration of the Arena Chapel at Padua, though it belongs only to Giotto's middle period, and lacks the reconciling grace which he infused into his later and more perfect work, remains incontestably the grandest existing expression in art, not only of the Gospel story, but of the faith of Christendom. Yet it receives only the scantiest recognition. When I last studied there in the winter of 1903-4, for five days consecutively my companion and myself were the only visitors to the chapel. The sacristan explained to us that there was nothing unusual in this experience, and that the impression left upon the more enterprising travellers, who followed their guide-books to the Arena,' was generally an impression of disappointment not unmixed with indignation, or even with disdain. Here is the curse of Venice. At Padua you are already inside the ring of magnetic attraction which surrounds the city of the sea; you are either anticipating already its atmosphere of ease and ecstasy or you are breathing it in retrospect and in regret; the spirit is oppressed by Giotto's sterner, more vigorous mountain air. But at Florence these very frescoes, over which you cast now a languid depreciatory eye, would rouse and thrill you; you would return to them again and again, you would see them in a true perspective and would appreciate at last the towering eminence of that Atlas mind which in the morning-tide of Christian art brought heaven and earth together.

The tide of specialist criticism is setting, momentarily, in a direction unfavourable to just recognition of the highest and grandest qualities of Giotto's genius. A movement of great interest is in progress, from which valuable results are to be expected, in the form of permanent contributions to the range of our knowledge. The desire to concentrate attention upon the abstract essence, by virtue of which art is art, to analyse and define the formal principle, in which all arts agree, the tendency even to suspect the validity of an artistic appreciation which over-rides these narrow restraints-these represent the main current of contemporary criticism. It argues no lack of appreciation either of the aim or the methods of this criticism to point out that, while thus pursuing the essence, as an abstraction, it is in danger of losing sight of the wider significance, the humaner aspects of the great subject with which it has proposed to deal. The distinguishing feature-the central essential quality which differentiates fine art and the love of it from all other forms of human activity and appreciation-is likely to be something delicate and elusive, and to defy easy formulation. In the meantime art depends, for its

value, as always, not merely upon this abstraction or the recognition of it, but upon the larger life, the universal interests, in which it plays its part, and without which it could have no part to play. It is, in fact, a partial, an imperfect, criticism which pursues the element of difference or separation. In a just appreciation this element is seen to be inseparable from the presuppositions, the foundations, that unify and set it in relation with the life of which it is an expression. Whatever value art possesses, it possesses only as part of a whole and in relation to the whole of which it is a part. It could have no meaning and no existence otherwise. There is a likelihood, therefore, that the greatest artists will be those in whose work this relativity is most conspicuous, who in their artistic achievement have laid themselves most whole-heartedly under contribution to the age and society they live in, and have attained the most perfect fusion of their artistic with all their other faculties. The greatest art will be that in which the formative principle of beauty appears not in any pride of isolation but as a reconciling, harmonising power, aiming at no crude self-assertion, but by submission vanquishing every alien element and asserting itself at last in a triumphant union with the entire armament of the soul. Giotto's art was of this calibre. We are sometimes told that the art of painting has not, in strictness, anything to do with an external world, with the familiar appearances of objects, with events as they happen in time or space. That it is something far removed from such banalities, and dwells in an invisible palace of its own building, founded upon the void: that if artists have taken upon themselves to tell stories now and then, they have forfeited their birthright by so doing, and made concessions to the grossness of humanity; they have acted not as artists, but as mere men, and if the artistic quality of their work has not been sacrificed altogether, they have retained it in their own despite. And rightly to admire the beauty of their achievement we must banish from our minds all thought of the event with which they have foolishly associated and encumbered it; we must follow not the story they think they have to tell, but those eternal verities to which all artists worth the name bear witness in every lightest touch upon the canvas or upon the wall.

Giotto's work rejects this kind of abstract, idealistic appreciation. If it is beautiful, its beauty is of a kind inextricably interwoven with the deeper significance, be it of legend or history, which the artist has used it to express and to reveal. Giotto recounts the Gospel narrative in pictures which every Christian child may understand: it is a pity all our children are not familiar with them. And is he less an artist on that account? Here, rather, is the culmination of his greatness; and here, too, is the quality which above all other qualities of his genius recommends him to our serious consideration to-day. We do not all conceive of the great story just as he did. But at the

least we recognise in the Gospels qualities which give them a unique place both in history and in literature; we recognise that if they are not at the centre of our culture, and do not contain the principle of our progress, yet we cannot point to anything more central, more essential, than they. Giotto's work appeals to us with all the simplicity and freshness, all the depth and grandeur, which make the Gospels sacred and sublime. It brings these high realities before us vivified, transfused by that warmth of imagination, whose issue we call beauty. Under the influence of this beauty the great past lives and breathes again, an animate presence to which the spirit has no choice but to respond.

Physical science has been at some pains recently to come to an understanding with itself and others as regards its attitude to religious belief, and the result has been a formal recognition-highly gratifying to minds in which the true relative positions of religion and science were inversed-of the credibility of certain contested tenets. With much seriousness, tinged perhaps with condescension, science has accorded them its papal imprimatur. They received a different and a more congenial ratification six hundred years ago. Giotto painted the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Ascension in a spirit so perfectly accordant with the profound significance attaching to these great Christian beliefs, equally whether we regard them as historically or poetically true, that, as we stand in the Arena Chapel, we realise once and for all that their truth, however we choose to explain or to define it, is here made manifest, revealed, endorsed. They have been proved in the mint of a new mind, and have returned from it, as they passed into it, pure gold. We forget the mechanism by which the metal was fused, or stamped, or moulded; we forget whether it is the spirit of art or of religion before which we bow. It is a new experience. We had heard it by hearing of the ear, but now the eye seeth it. Here, in the clear mirror of lofty imagination, Christ ascends in flesh and in spirit before our eyes; the earth we tread on becomes an earth we share with Him.

Art can achieve no greater thing than this, yet Giotto's art achieved no less. And if the human spirit is, indeed, a unity, then the faculty which raised it and rose with it to this summit of grandeur is one which at our peril we treat with suspicion or with disdain. We are not men without it, our vaunted efficiency is not four-square; our calculations are incomplete till they allow its proper weight to a factor of such tremendous power and consequence. The influence of beauty is a lever of inestimable force, and if we think to dispense with the use of it, it will not lie idle. Sever its connection with the machinery with which it should harmonise and interact, and sooner or later it is transformed into an instrument of destruction. Giotto was, as it were, a host in himself. He must have been a leader in

whatever age he had been born; but, for the most part, the agencies by which great art is brought to birth are under the control, not of the artist, but of the society to which he belongs. We are all members one of another, and it is at once the greatness and the weakness of the artistic temperament that, above all others, it finds self-knowledge, self-revelation, in self-surrender.

BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT.

'A TEMPERANCE TOWN'

In one of the theatres of Boston, Massachusetts, a play bearing the above title has been before the public for some considerable time. The plot is good and the situations are marked by a great deal of genuine pathos and humour, but the drama also owes its popularity to a definite and undoubted trend in popular opinion, for it is written with a distinct bias against the objects and methods of the more extreme Temperance reformers in the United States. The motive of the play is largely to demonstrate, by a succession of ludicrous and pathetic incidents, the absolutely unreal character of prohibition in a town where the sale of liquor is forbidden by the State law. Little effort, of course, is made to give a fair hearing to the claims put forward by the Temperance party that very real benefits have accrued from State prohibition. On the other hand, contempt and ridicule are freely lavished on the manifest failures, hypocrisies, and subterfuges which meet one at every turn in a temperance town' like Portland, Bangor, or Lewiston.

The Maine elections which were held in September of the present year were characterised by an amount of excitement and interest almost unprecedented in the history of the State. Maine in general and Cumberland county in particular had been for years a stronghold of Republicanism, but in September an amazing change came over the political scene. The majority in favour of the Republican governor, Mr. Cobb, sank from 26,816, in 1904, to 9,000-a loss of no fewer than 17,816 votes-while the county in which Portland is situated, always on former occasions safely relied upon to furnish a Republican majority of 2,000, now bestowed its allegiance on the Democratic party, and returned a Democratic sheriff, Mr. W. M. Pennell, by a largely increased majority. The explanation of this astonishing reversal of popular sentiment forms a most interesting chapter in the history of the Temperance movement. It marks a culminating point in the long, dreary struggle of the Maine towns against the coercion of the country districts, and is full of warning to practical politicians of our own country in view of the promised Temperance legislation of 1907. For nearly half a century prohibition in Portland had been little else than a name. One Republican sheriff after another had allowed