influences of the age. To speak in a few words of the manifold lessons on art, and life, and national polity which Mr Ruskin has given to his countrymen may appear less becoming than to be silent; but in truth the cardinal doctrine which runs through all his teaching can be stated in a line. It is that men-men and not the works of men, men and not materials, or machines, or gold, or even pictures, or statues, or public buildings should be the prime objects of our care, and reverence, and love. Hence it is that, as a writer on art, he necessarily becomes a moralist, since he must needs inquire from what human faculties does this work of art arise, and to what human faculties does it appeal? Hence it is that in the decline of architecture or painting he reads the degradation of national character. Hence it is that the life of the workman appears to him to be of higher importance than the quantity of work which he turns out. Hence it is that he has opposed himself to the orthodox political economy, with a sense that man, and the life and soul of man, cannot be legitimately set aside while we consider apart from these the laws of wealth or of so-called utility. No other truth can be quite so important for our own age, or for any age, as the truth preached so unceasingly and so impressively by Mr Ruskin.

I have named some of the fixed stars that shine in the firmament of our literature; but all of these have not been registered on my map; and lesser lights are left unnamed, and clusters, and galaxies, and nebulæ must remain disentangled and unresolved. I have spoken of eminent persons, because literature, as Cardi

nal Newman has said, "is essentially a personal work.” And I have spoken of these persons less as masters of technique, each in his own province, than as seekers for truth, because it seems to me a distinction of the literature of the Victorian period that it is the literature of a time of spiritual trial, difficulty, and danger, and that its greatest representatives have been before all else seekers, in matters social, moral, and religious, for some coherent conception or doctrine of life which shall bring unity to our emotions and law and impulse to our will.

Were we to anticipate the future of literature, of what worth were a guess or a venture at unauthentic prophecy? Some shy schoolboy on whom we had not reckoned, some girl in an unknown nook of rural England, may one day upset our cunningest calculations; and our hope is that it will be so. Two great factors, however, in the future, may be reckoned on with certainty— science and democracy. Already scientific conceptions have had their influence on the creatures of imagination, while, at the same time, a great school of historical study, scientific, not in the vain pretension of possessing a complete theory of human development, but in its exact aims and patient habits, has arisen in England. Literature in the future must surely confront science in a friendly attitude, welcoming all the facts and all the new lights that science brings, while maintaining its own diguity and independence, and resisting the temptation to forsake its own methods and processes because they are other than the methods of science. All kinds of material should be welcome to the soul, if only the soul will preserve its own supremacy over the material

which it uses. Having given ourselves away to observing and co-ordinating facts, having generalised from those facts, we must then recover our personal force and reassert ourselves as being, we ourselves, the first and last of all facts. "A man must sit solidly at home," says Emerson when speaking of the true uses of history, "and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world." No, he need not sit solidly at home; he may go forth and converse with kings and the envoys of empires, and then dismiss them haughtily and re-enter with added wisdom and power into the empire of himself. It is possible, indeed, that the old arts and the old types of beauty may be unable to survive the influences of an age of Science, commerce, democracy. Well, be it so; let us bid them a cheerful farewell, and confidently expect some new and as yet inconceivable manifestations of the spirit of order and beauty which can never become extinct while man remains man. "Beauty," says Emerson again, "will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart, it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic

battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works-to mills, railways and machinery—the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? . . . When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation."

Here we may end in a spirit of good hope. Let literature accept all modern facts, and at the same time let it assert and reinforce the soul. From the meeting of new truth and fuller and purer passion, what but some higher and unimagined forms of beauty must arise? Possibly no art of the schools, but a nobler art of life.

THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE.*

A DISCUSSION, in which many eminent persons took part, was held, not long since, with a view to finding an answer to the question, "What hundred books are the best?" It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised how to read any one of the hundred; for what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any one of them? Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, "a languid pleasure;" and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle with them.

Now if some of those who have proved their power of getting to the heart of great books were to tell us of their craft or their art or their method, we should listen with interest and attention; and if we were to compare method with method, we could not fail to learn something worth learning. One would like to know, for example, the process by which Sainte-Beuve dealt with an author; how he made his advances; how he invested and beleagred his author; how he sapped up to him, and drew his parallels and zigzags of approach; how he stormed the

*In this article I have said nothing of the historical study of literature and its interpretation through the general movements of the life and mind of nations.