'Never in woods Runs white insanity fleeing itself: all sane To this great example then let man conform himself, remembering ever that the intellectual and spiritual in him is drawn from earth as surely as the physical. The animality in man readily confesses its parentage; and the mistake of the ascetic, a mistake as abhorrent to the mind of Meredith as that of the sensualist, is to set up an antagonism between the material and the immaterial, to assert that one must be destroyed as baseborn and the other enthroned as of diviner origin. Spirit is as sour and thin in divorce from the body as the body is gross and ugly in divorce from spirit. Body and spirit are divine by the same divinity; and the test of manhood is to think and act, above all else to love, with a just understanding of both. Through all Meredith's 'nature poems' this theme is the under-current; its final expression is to be found in the grave and stately measure of 'A Reading of Life.' 6 The same theme is touched at a different point by the Hymn to Colour.' Reason about it, test it, disprove it as we may, the spirituality of earthly things remains for the human mind an abiding fact. Language may lay hold of it and riddle it through and show that it has no true substance; and yet it is known to all of us at moments that something not to be netted by language survives and escapes. As magnetism transfuses dead metal, so in beauty there is an essence and an influence which eludes our closest definition of beauty itself. It is for this, the intangible aura which hangs round beauty, that poetry exists; and poetry can render it only by symbols and imagery. And so in the Hymn to Colour' it is pictured as the transient moment of dawn, seen through the eyes that are the most poignantly quickened to seize it, the eyes of Love: 'Love eyed his rosy memories: he sang: O bloom of dawn, breathed up from the gold sheaf Held springing beneath Orient! that dost hang Than Time with all his host! 'Of thee to say behold, has said adieu : But love remembers how the sky was green, Between a blush and flame.' As colour in the world of nature, the shafts of rose and gold which bring day out of night, so is the spirit in man's life, the spirit without which life itself is dead. And love being the highest and widest and greatest of man's capacities, it is in love that the absence of the spirit is most a disaster and its presence an enchantment. Finally, brushing through our modern tangle of doubts and hesitations, salting the labours of heart and brain, comes the health-giving force which Meredith invoked as the spirit of comedy. 'Sword of common sense,' he apostrophised it; he was never tired of insisting that the best of things are the better for liberal seasonings of laughter. He was no doubt, in the strict sense, an optimist, if we care, indeed, to use so exhausted a title; but the word as trivially used, to denote the temperament that slides lightly over sin and sorrow, denying the power of either, has no application for him. He perfectly saw that the simple central life which he upheld grows harder with the growth of the world, and that the duty of brain to carve a shapely existence out of our huge legacy of advancing knowledge and increasing bewilderment becomes the heavier as we drive, 'shell and spirit,' the further into the void. The more need therefore that brain itself should be purged and fortified by that power of laughter which reminds us that, though self-consciousness is our pride and our distinction, it is also our ineluctable curse. We have learnt to survey ourselves, and there is no fear that we shall not find the sight absorbing. But there is the fear that we may dwell on it with such loving interest as to forget how relative is our importance; and equally in these days there is the fear of obsession by the horrors of the spectacle, till we magnify out of all proportion the strange disabilities which undermine our strength. Laughter purifies the air and corrects the dangerous refraction of our vision. Even in that sombre and difficult tragedy, to which Meredith gave the bitter name of 'Modern Love,' the irony that watches the death and burial of passion has the securely anchored sanity which we owe to the same great gift. And if it has virtue in tragedy, how much more certainly will it sweeten the beauty of hope and joy, where these have found their fulfilment. Its final and perfect effect is in the clear ring and flawless brilliance of 'Love in the valley.' Such, in summary outline, was the work and temper of a high and many-sided genius. His death we may readily see as the close of a great period of literature. His long career started in the days when romance was still supreme in art, and romance, with all its powers and all its limitations, was the material in which he wrought. Art has put on since those days so new a panoply that an artist, as we now understand the word, Meredith undoubtedly was not. That there is much splendid art scattered through his books the preceding pages have tried to show; but the restraining hand, the deliberate design, the critical sense of perfection, these are not to be found. More comprehensive still, the single-minded attitude of the artist before his work, his unqualified homage to it and it alone-this too was wanting. Yet with the literature of the past before us we must admit that romance did in its eagerness plunge its fingers more generously into life than art nowadays seems to have the secret of doing. Meredith's profusion, his exuberance, his ever-shaping imagination, his pomp of poetry, survived into a generation to whom such qualities as these have all the heroic fascination of a past more spacious and more intensely coloured than the present. Those who are gone are always greater than those who remain-this we may recognise and concede. But in a more special sense we may realise that with Meredith died the last of his race. In art his aims are no longer ours, nor in life perhaps his creed; yet the further we may diverge from either, the more clearly we must perceive the strength and beauty which crowned so widely based and so living a work. PERCY LUBBOCK. Art. 10.-ORIENTAL ART. 1. Painting in the Far East. By Laurence Binyon. London: Arnold, 1908. 2. Manuel d'Art Musulman. By Gaston Migeon. Paris: Picard, 1907. 3. Mediaval Sinhalese Art. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Printed in the Norman Chapel, Broad Campden, 1908. 4. Indian Sculpture and Painting. By E. B. Havell. London: Murray, 1908. THOSE Who concern themselves with art are apt to look with a kind of admiring envy on the man of science, to think of him as continually progressing to the conquest of new worlds, urged on by a breathless anticipation of ever new and more astonishing wonders. But if the artist feels discouraged and overshadowed by the great creations of the past, the critic and student of applied æsthetics is to-day held in almost the same breathless suspense as the man of science before the new worlds of art which recent research has revealed to his wondering gaze. To almost the same extent as the man of science he finds himself out of his bearings, bewildered and amazed at the multiplicity and strangeness of the new unassimilated material. For him too it is imperative to find a new orientation, to provide himself with new charts and new guiding principles. The specialist in any particular branch of art is usually spared this effort. For him the discovery of historical data, all the quasiscientific apparatus and curiosity of the researcher, is sufficient guide and stimulus. He takes refuge in a happy prejudice which gives to his particular branch of art an indisputable pre-eminence in his own opinion. This is doubtless as it should be. Without some such fortunate illusion the work before him could never be accomplished. But the mere critic, the man who seeks, however fondly, to adjust the valuation of any and every artistic expression of the human spirit, who must for ever keep his mind and feelings alert for the acceptance of new æsthetic truth, may well feel a certain bewilderment at the vast mass of new æsthetic experience which lies open to him. Vol. 212.-No. 422. Especially is this true of the art of the East. Scarcely more than a hundred years ago art meant for a cultivated European, Graeco-Roman sculpture and the art of the high Renaissance, with the acceptance of a few Chinese lacquers and porcelains as curious decorative trifles. Then came the admission that Gothic art was not barbarous, that the Primitives must be reckoned with, and the discovery of early Greek art. The acceptance of Gothic and Byzantine art as great and noble expressions of human feeling, which was due in no small degree to Ruskin's teaching, made a breach in the wellarranged scheme of our æsthetics, a breach through which ever new claimants to our admiring recognition have poured. When once we have admitted that the Graeco-Roman and high Renaissance views of art-and for our purposes we may conceive these as practically identical-are not the only right ones, we have admitted that artistic expression need not necessarily take effect through a scientifically complete representation of natural appearances, and the painting of China and Japan, the drawings of Persian potters and illuminators, the ivories, bronzes, and textiles of the early Mohammedan craftsmen, all claim a right to serious consideration. And now, finally, the claim is being brought forward on behalf of the sculptures of India, Java, and Ceylon. These claims have got to be faced; we can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look; we have no longer any system of æsthetics which can rule out, a priori, even the most fantastic and unreal artistic forms. They must be judged in themselves and by their own standards. To the European mind of to-day, saturated as it is with some centuries of representative art, there is always some initial difficulty in thus shifting the point of view to one in which likeness to natural appearances, as we understand them, can no longer be used as the chief criterion of value. The average amateur is apt to think, even before the masterpieces of primitive Italian art, before Giotto or Simone Martini, that these are very good considering the time when they were made, or at least, that they would be better if they conformed more to his own standards of representation. Such an idea implies always an imperfect grasp of the language of the early |