that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.  There are always new attitudes for the mind, and new points of view.  The duty of imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the world advances.  There was never a time when Criticism was more needed than it is now.  It is only by its means that Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived.—The Critic as Artist.

WITHOUT FRONTIERS

Goethe—you will not misunderstand what I say—was a German of the Germans.  He loved his country—no man more so.  Its people were dear to him; and he led them.  Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent.  ‘How can one write songs of hatred without hating?’ he said to Eckermann, ‘and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?’  This note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the future.  Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.  If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element.  As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.  When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.  The change will of course be slow, and people will not be conscious of it.  They will not say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land.  Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist.  It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.—The Critic as Artist.

THE POETRY OF ARCHÆOLOGY

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius.’  On opening the coffer they found within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer’s skill from corruption and the decay of time.  Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed.  Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judæa’s rough and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night, and in secret buried.  Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world.  Archæology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.  From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Cæsar,’ and the service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts—the arts of arrested movement—but its influence was to be seen also in the great Græco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published—a fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.—The Truth of Masks.

THE ART OF ARCHÆOLOGY

Indeed archæology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.  Better Endymion than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!  And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?  Art, and art only, can make archæology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours.  Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.  At the beginning of the century the Nuremberg Chronicle, with its two thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s Cosmography.  Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.  After the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an important influence on English costume.—The Truth of Masks.

HEROD SUPPLIANT

Non, non, vous ne voulez pas cela.  Vous me dites cela seulement pour me faire de la peine, parce que je vous ai regardée pendant toute la soirée.  Eh! bien, oui.  Je vous ai regardée pendant toute la soirée.  Votre beauté m’a troublé.  Votre beauté m’a terriblement troublé, et je vous ai trop regardée.  Mais je ne le ferai plus.  Il ne faut regarder ni les choses ni les personnes.  Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs.  Car les miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques . . . Oh!  Oh! du vin! j’ai soif . . . Salomé, Salomé, soyons amis.  Enfin, voyez . . . Qu’est-ce que je voulais dire?  Qu’est-ce que c’était?  Ah! je m’en souviens! . . . Salomé!  Non, venez plus près de moi.  J’ai peur que vous ne m’entendiez pas . . . Salomé, vous connaissez mes paons blancs, mes beaux paons blancs, qui se promènent dans le jardin entre les myrtes et les grands cyprès.  Leurs becs sont dorés, et les grains qu’ils mangent sont dorés aussi, et leurs pieds sont teints de pourpre.  La pluie vient quand ils crient, et quand ils se pavanent la lune se montre au ciel.  Ils vont deux à deux entre les cyprès et les myrtes noirs et chacun a son esclave pour le soigner.  Quelquefois ils volent à travers les arbres, et quelquefois ils couchent sur le gazon et autour de l’étang.  Il n’y a pas dans le monde d’oiseaux si merveilleux.  Il n’y a aucun roi du monde qui possède des oiseaux aussi