How does all this apply to literature? | softness of the scene; but would an accuSurely in this way: that the pen no more rate and minute account of each tree and than the pencil should aim at a mere re- clump and shelving bank do any better? production of material fact; but should Ought we to say there are first three hunrender that and something more. A fine dred and sixty-nine orange trees in a garlandscape painter gathers up all the feat- den of half an acre, then a jet d'eau six ures of his scene in his mind, and throws feet high, then five hundred yards of them on his canvas glorified and individ- slope descending at the incline of two ualized-so that as he saw that mountain | feet in a hundred on a limestone soil; the

grass is unfitted for hay, the trees of no value as timber, but worth somewhat as fuel? It is quite clear that the latter class of description may be desirable, indeed, if we want to purchase the house and garden to which it refers; but it is not literature, but business-a surveyor's or valuator's report, not a piece of literary or artistic composition. In like manner, if we should need to go to law about anything, we may desire a sworn information, or procès verbal, describing it minutely. But all these are necessities extraneous to literature, and true literature should make no pretence to fulfill their requirements. The veracity of the writer is engaged to this, and this only, that his impression is reproduced in his work. Of course, according to the nature of the case, there may be a moral obligation involved in the care taken to make that impression coördinate with the facts; but this is another matter to literary veracity.

or forest, others may see it henceforth for ever. As we all know, this is produced by no servile copying of every rock or tree, every blade of the grass, every leaf of the wood. When modern artists, honestly seeking truth, have laboriously accomplished such servile copies, they have missed their aim, and made something which is no "expression of their impression" at all-something less like their impression than a few free touches of a master's brush would have produced. All this must apply to the author as to the painter. His business is first to obtain a vivid and true impression, and then so to express it as shall best convey the same to the reader. Is this to be done best by a record of sensations and ideas produced by the scene, or by a dry literal catalogue of objects and facts? Shall, for instance, the present writer describe the view before her eyes, by telling of gardens sloping down through grassy glades to the sea, the deep shadows of the To apply all this to biography. It ilex lying heavy on the ground, and the seems clear (if the principles above stated stone-pines standing out in lovely outlines be true), that the biographer's office is to against the sky and dazzling waters, and render justly his impression of his subpalms and oranges and cypresses blending ject's life and character, in the way of art with the blossoming apricot and almond-not in the way of a report of the one, in masses of glorious coloring; of the fountain playing close by, as fountains only play in Italy; the birds singing in the joy of opening spring, and the calm and soft Mediterranean beating gently, like the pulsations of a peaceful heart, against the low, tideless shore? No words can convey perfectly the richness and the

statues of Homer were now discovered, the one accurately reproducing his rags and miserable appearance, the other idealizing him in the noblest style of Greek art, as the great poet of the Iliad-which should we desire to behold of the

two statues ?" It is clear we should desire to see

first the merely imitative portrait; but such desire on our part would not argue any thing against the idealized one being alone worthy the name of art. Curiosity would be our motive of choice; but esthetic taste and art certainly aim at something higher than the mere gratification of curiosity-else (as we said before) photography is the

climax of art.

or a sworn information of the other. He is then under no obligation to enter upon details which motives of kindness or of reverence may induce him to pass over in silence, provided always that the impression he has derived from any such details known to him be fairly rendered by his general description of his subject. He must make his hero neither better nor worse than such facts prove him to have been.

This principle would, we apprehend, relieve biographers of one class of their difficulties the impression, namely, that they are called upon when they undertake a biography, to share with the public all they know concerning their subject, and reproduce the material facts, in crude literature, on which their judgment has been formed. When all is done, however, it must be avowed that other and great

their teachers inform them) they have no right to claim the sympathy of the good now alive, or to appropriate the experience of the pious of old. How the few books which appeared twenty years ago-Ar

White's Life-and told us that good and sincere men had felt our doubts, and struggled through our trials-how they poured light and comfort into our hearts! How many men and women, now calm and happy in rational faith, may be thankful for having had the intolerable solitude of their hearts in youth dissipated for ever by books like these! It is quite clear that whatever may be demanded of us, the sacrifice of that which gives its value to books of this class can not be required. Their subjects would be the last to desire it. Here, then, in fact, lies the test of the biographer's capacity for his work. Can he retain what he ought to retain, and exclude what he ought to exclude, with regard at once to the interests of the living and the sacredness of the dead?

difficulties will often remain, with which nothing but consummate good taste can enable an author to deal. If publicity given to things which ought to be kept secret is a great evil and mischief, on the other hand the concealment of things cal-nold's Life, Sterling's Life, Blanco culated to afford deep insight into human nature, to warn or to encourage, is no less truly a great loss and injury to the world. One of the many sorrows of youth, to which later life brings comfort, is the impression that we are alone in our struggles, our trials, and our sins. Sometimes it is a morbid vanity which makes us hug the idea of our lot being quite unparal leled. More often, perhaps, it is a very innocent and natural ignorance of the inner circle of other homes and other lives which makes us feel we are differently constituted from our kind. Then comes a very real danger from an imaginary fact. "It is not good for man to be alone" (even in fancy) in the world. Every thing becomes unhealthy, the greatest truths seem unreal, as the isolated consciousness works without its natural aid of sympathy from other minds possessed of similar consciousness. Struggles seem hopeless when we do not know that any other soul has ever striven and conquered in the same fight. Above all, sins assume sometimes the most portentous and giant shapes, before which we stand paralyzed with fear and shame, abandoning, perhaps, all hope and effort for our own recovery, till in some blessed moment we learn that 2. Fiction has a veracity of its own to one who has since become a saint on preserve. How far is it lawful, for inearth, or an angel in heaven, fell once stance, in fiction, to introduce real persons under the same Apollyon who has crushed known to the writer, draw the portrait us, and then rose up and slew him, and sufficiently exact to make them recognizpassed on, "singing softly," on the celes-able, and then add purely imaginary feattial way. Then the demon who seemed ures of character or actions or opinions, to hide the whole horizon of our lives, and which the reader shall henceforth inexblot out the very sun with his shadow, tricably associate with the real person? shrinks to a tangible hideous fact-bad We are all ready to condemn such a pracand black enough, Heaven knows! but a tice utterly, when plainly described; but fact which, with God's great help, we will it is done every day, in fact, and that by drive off our path for evermore. It can writers of high reputation. In what the not be doubted that books revealing deep Germans call Tendenz novels (novels with moral and religious experiences are in a purpose), it is, in fact, the regular custhese ways of immense utility. Especially tom to take for the type of some opinion are they so to us, to whom the guiding to be preached up or preached down, (and also contaminating and self-desecrat- somebody who may be fairly identified ing) practice of the confessional is un- therewith, and then having duly labeled known, and especially also in our day, and ticketed his unhappy specimen, the when new phases of intellectual creed dis- novelist, inasmuch as he is a novelist, and turb the spiritual life in a thousand ways, not a biographer, proceeds to draw from and make half the thoughtful youth of his imagination facts and adventures and the land pass through a stage wherein (as ideas, to be attributed to the specimen in

Beside these religious sanctities of life, there are the domestic and friendly ones, whose violation is hardly a less offense. Of course the consent of the parties in question is usually the test of justifiable publicity here; but what is to be done when the exculpation of one is the blame of another? There are difficult dilemmas here also.

his story, and woven in as neatly as may second supplies our needs, and aids our be with the description drawn from actual prosperity as merchants, soldiers, sailors, life. We have seen one of these, wherein bricklayers, and seamstresses, wanting it was intended to demolish a certain too food, clothing, shelter, wealth, health, hardy thinker, and wherein he was accord- pleasure, power, fame, or any other ingly first identified unmistakably with earthly good." Of course, that which a certain character in the book, and then aids the higher and moral part of us, also that character was made responsible for in a certain way elevates and aids the the opinions of a totally different and an- lower; and of course, all which aids the tagonistic thinker, and, in that capaci- lower to its natural and true well-being, ty, easily and triumphantly annihilated. serves to afford a sounder basis for the These things remind us continually of higher. But the classification is a real Archbishop Whately's excellent simile and most valuable one, affording us a clue between the practices of ancient heathens to many labyrinthine problems of social toward Christian martyrs, and those of science, and reconciling the eternal quarmodern theological critics to their sub-rel between the thinkers and the workers, jects-"they both dress their victims in the Aurora Leighs of the world and the the skins of wild beasts, so as completely to disguise them, and then set the dogs to tear them to pieces."

practical philanthropists. In like manner in art (the arts of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture), there are two Again: Fiction may avoid the sin of utilities-the lower utility of giving exthus misrepresenting individuals, but is it pression to the thought, and the higher justified in maligning human nature itself? utility which lies in the thought itself. Reading certain classes of literature, very The first is very needful-just as the suppopular in England just now, it would port of our animal life, and supply of our seem as if nobody were offended at pic-lower wants, is needful for all higher purtures of life which would make us all a set of crawling worms unfit to be suffered to exist, much less to be made subjects of a work of art. If men be all mean and interested and worldly-minded, then it is no more proper to make them subjects of fiction than wasps, toads, and maggots. It is a marvelous thing how the admiration for the mere savoir faire of the clever writer, painter, sculptor, blinds men to the question whether their art is exercised on a fitting or an unfitting subject-that is, whether it is worth something or nothing at all. The more people become amateurs of style-cognoscenti-or even practical artists themselves, so much greater seems the danger of their forgetting the whole scope and meaning of art in their criticism of the more or less successful way in which the effort is made to render any meaning whatever.

In Sidney's Essay in Defense of Poetry there is a profound observation concerning the different sorts of utility. "There is," he says, "an utility of the higher and of the lower mind; an ultimate and absolute utility, and a secondary and subordinate utility. The first concerns the great final ends of our existence, the second the temporary purposes of our present condition. The first utility promotes our welfare as men and women, immortal and rational moral agents; the

poses. The body must be cared for first, and then the soul. But the reason why the body itself exists is, we humbly believe, to afford a basis and scaffolding for the higher life of the soul; and assuredly art exists only to afford expression to thought. Thus, then, in every work of art there are two things to be measured : the expression, which may be good, bad, or indifferent; and the thought expressed, which also may be good, bad, or indifferent. Clearly the best art is the best thought best expressed; but when this can not be attained, what is the next best thing? Is it a bad or indifferent thought well expressed, or a good thought badly or indifferently expressed? Benson says, "The good, beautiful, noble thought, however imperfectly expressed." Popu lar judgment would seem to say the bad, vulgar, commonplace thought well expressed. Thus, in painting and sculpture, we continually hear cried up as marvels the clever representation of subjects essentially base, and even gross; and in literature we find enormous value attached to the sharp delineation of meanness, or the bold portraiture of vice. Surely the sound estimate of such works would rather lead us to deplore that the power of forcible expression had been attained by those who have no thoughts which ought to be expressed at all. All power mis