fibs are always very crude. I am very glad, for my own sake, that you are going to marry Osmond; but I won't pretend I am glad for yours. You are very remarkable-you know that's what people call you; you are an heiress, and very good-looking and clever, very original; so it's a good thing to have you in the family. Our family is very good, you know; Osmond will have told you that; and my mother was rather distinguished-she was called the American Corinne. But we are rather fallen, I think, and perhaps you will pick us up. I have great confidence in you; there are ever so many things I want to talk to you about. I never congratulate any girl on marrying; I think it's the worst thing she can do. I suppose Pansy oughtn't to hear all this; but that's what she has come to me forto acquire the tone of society. There is no harm in her knowing that it isn't such a blessing to get married. When first I got an idea that my brother had designs upon you, I thought of writing to you, to recommend you, in

the strongest terms, not to listen to him. Then I thought it would be disloyal, and I hate anything of that kind. Besides, as I say, I was enchanted, for myself; and after all, I am very selfish. By the way, you won't respect me, and we shall never be intimate. I should like it, but you won't. Some day, all the same, we shall be better friends than you will believe at first. My husband will come and see you, though, as you probably know, he is on no sort of terms with Osmond. He is very fond of going to see pretty women, but I am not afraid of you. In the first place, I don't care what he does. In the second, you won't care a straw for him; you will take his measure at a glance. Some day I will tell you all about him. Do you think my niece ought to go out of the room? Pansy, go and practise a little in my boudoir."

"Let her stay, please," said Isabel. "I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not!"

HENRY JAMES, Jr.

THOSE who are inclined to despair of art (which is here taken to include poetry) have sometimes pointed out that the greatest imaginative works are religious. By this is meant not that these works were necessarily composed with a directly religious purpose, but that they sprang up in an atmosphere of faith; that the artists frankly accepted the ideas which expressed that faith; and that their buildings, sculptures, paintings, or poems, if not representations of those ideas, stand, at any rate, in a vital connection with them. Many of those ideas we have come to regard as mythological; whether wholly so, as in the case of Greek sculpture and poetry; or only in part, as in that of Italian painting and the poems of Dante and Milton. They are, there fore, no longer matters of belief to us, but they were so to the old artists and poets. Hence we draw the inference that the greatest art depends, as a rule, upon the prevalence of a mythology which is accepted by the artist as religious truth. But there is no such living mythology now which the best minds can accept as religious truth; and we are unable to conceive how our civilisation, if it pursues its present course, is ever again to produce one. And so our poetry seems doomed either to seek its subjects in the everyday

profane" world, which has never yet yielded it the highest material; or else, if it persist in the attempt to embody religious ideas, it must indulge itself in a conscious illusion, and produce works which will not satisfy either the love of beauty or the love of truth. Under these circumstances, the arts may continue to be adornments of life and channels of harmless pleasure, but they will never again feel within them the energy which comes of a union of our highest beliefs with the

sense of beauty, and which produced the masterpieces of more fortunate times. The poorness of most modern religious pictures, and the devotion of many of our painters to portrait and landscape, may be cited as witnesses to this point of view. Architecture, though it represents no definite ideas, does not thrive in the air of modern religion. The only

art which has reached its zenith since the supposed ages of faith, is one which expresses not beliefs, but (if anything) those vague emotions which make no assertions and therefore cannot be denied.

I will not attempt in the present essay to separate the truth and falsehood mingled in this view. To say nothing of the compensating advantages it neglects, we should have to ask, first of all, whether it really applies to poetry at all. Was not Shakespeare the greatest of poets, and Goethe among the greatest and what mythology taken for fact was the lifeblood of their creations? Again, can the fact that music-which is after all an art, and not a mass of interjections -reached its highest point in a “godless" century, be explained by its independence of definite ideas-an independence scarcely greater than that of architecture, and enjoyed or suffered in various degrees by the other arts? Further, to come nearer the root of the matter, are we sure that Eschylus and Phidias "believed in the literal truth of the mythology they used? or, conversely, that we could adequately express, in the terms of Catholic mythology, the ideas which Michael Angelo or Raphael embodied? And again, if art is really so dependent on religious belief, how does it happen that men pletely estranged from the orthodox

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creed admire the Madonna di San Siste with a whole heart; and that those who believe neither in heaven, hell, nor purgatory, find the Divine Comedy as great a poem as those who believe in all three? It may be retorted that it is one thing to appreciate a work of art, and another to produce it; that our doubts concern production, and production only; and that these works were produced by men whose imagination and faith were at one. But, admitting that this union is necessary, a wider question would still remain. Is it not the case that every day, without knowing it, we are making new mythological modes of thought and speech? Is not the popularisation of that science which is the most active dissolvent of old mythology, itself thoroughly mythological? And can we suppose that the general view which civilised men will come to hold, will be purely scientific, and will not gradually express itself in some symbolic body of ideasideas which may then stir the minds of men, and therefore of poets, with a power not less direct and productive than of old-ideas which scarcely any one would call religious now, but which will be religious then? Indications of such a possible future are not wanting, but this is not the place to discuss them. One thing is clear, that any progress of religion which expressed the best tendencies of modern culture would radically change the nature of the antithesis of sacred and profane; would be able to include in the sphere of the former much that is now supposed to lie beyond it; and would tend to find in nature, in social life and in national history constant manifestations of that divineness which, in the orthodox belief, was shown rather in the violation of natural laws, in the tradition of a church or the statements of a book, and in a few events out of the whole history of the world. With any such change the range of the religious imagination would be greatly widened, and a mythology might arise which poets

and artists could use without constant

For we

misgivings as to its truth. should recollect that it is not natural to men to be always asking after the truth of their habitual ideas, and that some of our doubts about the future come from our supposing it to be afflicted by the passing troubles of our own day. The time may come when even educated people will work, enjoy, and worship in peace; when every man, however busy, and however ill instructed he may be, will not think it necessary to have a private religion or philosophy of his own, but the pursuit of new truths will be left to the very small minority who can do some good by it; when we shall not be questioned over our soup about the immortality of the soul, but we shall look at the monkeys in the Zoological Gardens without fear or favour, and never dream of drawing from our relationship to them excited inferences as to our relationship to God.

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;

But this is the dream of a future perhaps far distant. And even if it were soon realised in a small section of society, the conditions which seem necessary to religious art would remain unsatisfied. Religious art, and indeed any art of the greatest kind, seems to rest on popular foundations; general spirit of Shakespeare's plays is the spirit of the England of his day, not of a heretical or advanced section and it is probable that such a revival of art as we have been contemplating presupposes a change in religious ideas going deep into the heart of the nation, and therefore requiring for its completion a time which it would be idle to calculate. Leaving, therefore, the development of the questions here indicated for some other opportunity, I wish now to suggest a less ambitious hope. I put aside the assertion that all great art requires a mythology believed to be fact, and the possible retort that art needs no mythology at all. I shall try to point out that at any rate good poetry, if not the best, can be written in connection with a mythology known not to be fact; that a surprisingly large quantity of such

poetry has been produced in modern times; and that our own day, both in its advantages and defects, is peculiarly favourable to such poetry, because our knowledge of mythology is being rapidly and largely increased, and because the use of the greater part of this material involves no collision with other interests. Lastly, I will venture to suggest that, by the extension of this poetical attitude to all mythical material, it may be possible to retain something of the value of religious ideas which are no longer recognised as scientifically true. I shall confine myself to poetry, and to the poetry of the last hundred years, although there are other arts not less interested in the subject; and I shall try to illustrate the ways in which mythology has been successfully used, and to point out some of the conditions necessary to success.

In its origin a myth is the natural, though symbolic, expression of something we may call it indifferently an emotion or an idea-which is vividly interesting; and it is the essence of living mythological language that it should be thus natural to those who use it, whether it represents to us a feeling (e.g. "it went to my heart"), or whether a whole system of thoughts is implied in it, as for instance when we say that the succession of events is "guided" or "governed" by laws. of nature. And this naturalness is required in poetry even more than in other forms of speech, so that any difficulty in adopting the words of a poet is, for the time being, fatal to our enjoyment of them. This fact would seem a serious obstacle to the use of any past mythology. For here we have something created by men who lived in a different civilisation from our own, and had different ideas from ours, and who found these stories and legends the obvious imaginative vehicle of their experience. These legends are therefore not the form into which we should spontaneously cast our own ideas; and if we are to make use of them in poetry-other uses of them do

not concern us here-the problem is so to reshape the material they give us, that it may express ideas, feelings, experiences interesting to us, in a form natural and poetically attractive to us. There will always remain a large mass of mythology which cannot be made use of in this way; some of it has been practically "used up" by ancient poets; some of it is intrinsically insignificant; some of it has a real meaning and interest, but it has taken a shape so intricate or so dependent on national or local peculiarities, that it never can be made to appeal to us directly. But there remains in certain mythologies, and probably in all, a good deal which has not been already versified, and which is really as interesting to us as it was to those who believed in the legends which embody it; and such legends can be used in modern poetry. In the poet's mind the story is gradually, and perhaps unconsciously, transformed until it expresses by external changes the changed shape which the original meaning has assumed for him. These changes may be small or great, and they have their limits. But in all cases there is really some change, although the myth is, as we say, the same; and I think it will be found that the first requisite for the poetic treatment of an old myth is that it should be used as mere material, and handled with perfect freedom. Adherence to it, which is sometimes called adherence to truth, is neither a merit nor a defect. The sole object and the sole criterion is the poetic success of the new work, and that sets the only valid limit to change; since a departure from the old form, of such a kind that we are constantly aware of incongruities between the new and old, is tantamount to poetic failure.

Poetic failure may be produced in another way, and may be accompanied by strict fidelity to the outward form

1 Still even in this case certain aspects of the myth may become the basis of a successful modern work. Mr. Tennyson's Ulysses is an instance.