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, sculp tures, 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, therefore, 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 completely estranged from the orthodox

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 ideas-ideas 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

misgivings as to its truth. For we

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.

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; the 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.

of the material. Instead of allowing the myth to develop in imagination until it has assumed the meaning and shape natural to the modern poet, he may introduce into it ready-made modern ideas, and force it to express them. And it will be able to express them only through a highly symbolical or even allegorical treatment. In this case only half the problem is solved, and the half by itself is worth little. The idea has an interest for us, but its expression is not the natural expression. Matters may be even

worse.

We may feel that its expression is the form appropriate to some other idea or experience; and consequently we become aware of an incongruity fatal to poetic enjoyment. Or, worse still, it may be that the idea presented to us has not a poetic interest for us at all, but a directly moral or religious one; and in this case we complain that a beautiful story has been spoilt for purposes not poetical. But, whether this be so or not, the idea introduced by the allegory almost always has this in common with moral ideas, that it is not produced by the poetic imagination, and therefore inseparable and indistinguishable from its embodiment, but is a current idea, due in a greater or less degree to abstraction, and therefore capable of only an artificial connection with the myth which is supposed to express it. The consequences of this procedure can be best explained by illustration. Here we may at once state our second requisite for this kind of poetry :-in the new poem, as in the old myth, the meaning and the form should be completely harmonious, and form a natural unity. The species of verse which seems to offer the greatest obstacle to success of this kind is the pure lyric. For here the poet, instead of writing about a myth, has to speak the language of it, to utter as the direct outcome of his own personal feeling what he nevertheless puts into the mouth of some mythological figure. Yet this is what Goethe has actually done in more than one instance. I am thinking of

that series of unrhymed lyrics of which Ganymed, Prometheus, and Mahomet's Gesang are the most famous. Let us dwell for a moment on the first of these and ask, for the purposes of our subject, what Goethe has accomplished. On the basis of a subject unpromising enough for a modern poet he has produced a lyric which hardly stands second to any even of his own songs in its glowing ardour and passionate directness. The reason is that, paying no regard to historical exactness, he has seized in the myth what is of lasting import, the idea (if we must put it in a theoretical shape) of a yearning towards the life or love or spirit that is in nature and beyond it. It is not that in his mind the idea has this meagre form, and that he forces the myth to express it; but the myth means that to him, is that to him; that and the myth are one and the same thing. Probably it was so when first he heard the story. Perhaps, as time went on, its old shape died more and more out of his mind, until at last, under the influence of some special occasion, this essence of it took a new shape in that song of Ganymed, which certainly would have been astonishing to a Greek, but which is none the worse for that. The song gives utterance to an idea or mood which, in Wordsworth and Shelley, produced poems of the most various kinds. It was a mood which coloured a whole period of Goethe's life and some of his best verse; the mood which during his year's sojourn in Italy seemed to bathe his whole nature in sunlight; the mood which produced poems so perfect, yet so different, as the seventh of the Roman Elegies and the Proœmion to Gott und Welt. But in the first of these Goethe has given the feeling a strictly classical form; and in the latter the classical associations have quite disappeared. At this earlier time the ancient form was not yet natural to him, and the meaning he divined in the legend found a more purely lyrical expression. It melted so completely into his own joy and

longing that it could not be described, it could only sing itself out. It was no dead and soulless prospect that met his eye, no "senseless gust that called to him in the wind. One spirit was moving within him and without him, panting for union, incarnate in light and sound and in the eye and ear. It is at such moments that for men of all times the earth in spring seems to thrill towards her lover the sun; possibly some such feeling may have underlain the original myth; and, however that may be, it found in Goethe's case no utterance so natural as words which he could connect with the memory of Ganymed:

Hinauf, hinauf strebt's.

Es schweben die Wolken
Abwärts, die Wolken

Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe.
Mir! Mir

In eurem Schoose

Aufwärts!

Umfangend umfangen! Aufwärts an deinen Busen, Allliebender Vater!!

The sign of excellence in a poem like this is that it gives us a single total impression, and that a purely poetic one. For this means that the meaning and form are completely fused. Our first thought of Ganymed is not that it is historically exact or inexact, moral or immoral, full of religious meaning or destitute of it; that it is wonderfully clever or that we have had a new pleasure: our first thought is that it is beautiful. Other qualities may be there, second thoughts may dwell on them; and, if we have faith in human nature, we shall be slow to suppose that a completely satisfactory poem can be really immoral or irreligious. But before the religion, the morality, the spiritual significance can enter into it, they have to pass through imagination, to lose their individuality, and to issue as sublimity or pathos or loveliness. If they have not suffered this change, well, doubtless they retain their original value-and it may be a value greater than any æsthetic worth-but æsthetic

worth they have not. And in so far as their prominence in a poem interferes with the purely poetic impression, so that our judgment expresses itself in words which are not æsthetic, their effect is as perverting as considerations of beauty would be in a judicial sentence or in the giving of alms. It is the same with political and with simply intellectual interests. That political feelings sometimes produce fine poetry is certain, but they cannot do so without losing their directly practical character: it is no praise to say of a poem that it is on the right side. Purely intellectual ideas and processes, again, only enter into art by being subordinated to imagination and "touched with its emotion: do not commend a poem when we say that it is philosophical, or pay it a compliment when we call it clever. It is no æsthetic merit in the second part of Faust that moral and metaphysical truths can be dug out of those large portions of it which give no poetic pleasure. And it is because Ganymed, in spite of or in addition to all its other interest, does produce a complete æsthetic effect, that it offers in some respects an ideal example of the use of an old myth.

we

One

Our view may perhaps gain in clearness if we apply it to a series of poems now widely popular. In the whole history of English verse Greek mythology has never been so systematically treated as in the Epic of Hades. of its critics has spoken of the author's "enterprise of connecting the Greek myth with the higher and wider meaning which Christian sentiment naturally finds for it;" and the description is just, if the word "Christian is allowed a wide enough Whether this enterprise is poetically justified depends entirely on the manner in which the "connection" is effected. But before we try to answer this question, let us say at once that the author of the Epic of Hades has done literature a service of a kind especially needed. He has at all events this great claim on our welcome, that

sense.