lous than he who keeps his Art in a cupboard and brings it out with his opera-glasses when he goes to the theatre. To finite intelligence nothing is incomparable except the incomprehensible, because it is only by comparison that anything is understood; and nothing is unrelated except God, who is absolute, and therefore incomprehensible, and can only be sought in his works, of which Mind is chief; although as the Mind is itself the seeker it can only imperfectly understand itself. God is the circumference and Mind the centre; God illumines the Mind, which, like a prism, radiates the light in three principal colours-Religion, Science, and Art-whose borders coalesce, as in a rainbow, and are the most beautiful and interesting parts of them, forming many subdivisions, still further indicative of God's nature. For outside of the Mind all measurements, all appreciations are worthless; only within it are the grade of relation and the scales of proportion; there and there only can be estimated the true balance. It is evident, therefore, that true Wisdom can only be attained by the culture of Imagination. Many things that men now estimate of supreme value will then be seen to be comparatively worthless, and many things now supposed to be "common or unclean will then appear "pearls of great price." But Man does not know, "in this his day, the things that belong unto his peace; for now are they hid from his eyes”; because, as Wordsworth says The world is too much with us, late or soon, and Wordsworth was a sober poet, not given to rhapsody. CHAPTER III THROUGH FALSE IDEAS OF GENIUS RETURNING from our ramble after Words, let us now put ourselves into remembrance that Poetry fails through Commercialism and through loss of the sense of Relation and Proportion. But it fails even more, perhaps, through false ideas of Genius. If ever the world leave off standing on its head and subordinating the brain to the belly, a posture by no means conducive to true comparison, it will no longer esteem Art as less important than Business; for it will perceive, that, whereas Business is the dream of material things, Art is the reality of intellectual things. Whether, however, Art will ever be powerful enough to set the world on its feet again is doubtful. Art, Religion, and Science might do it in combination; but at present Religion and Science are too fond of their limits and limitations. Possibly Art will do it, when she has absorbed them both. Meanwhile, she can only protest against the errors produced by the world's abnormal posture; and chief of these is the doctrine of Genius. poet, GENIUS IMPLIES GENERAL DILIGENCE. "The very essence of Poetry," says Pro- Sec. (a). fessor Courthope, "is supposed to lie in the A PASSIONATE inspiration of the individual the sources of which are beyond the reach of critical investigation; nor do I deny that there is some truth in this view of the matter. It may be freely admitted that in estimating that indefinable quality called Genius, the force that makes a great poet, a great statesman, or a great general what he is, must necessarily defy analysis." But statesmen and generals, however great, are not supposed to be exempt from labour. It is only in Art, and especially in Poetry, that success is thought to be entirely due to Genius. Why this is so it would be hard to say. One might have fancied that mere analogy would have prevented so stupid a 1 History of English Poetry, vol. 1, p. 1. blunder. Even when Society talks of the Genius of its cooks and the Poetry of their dinners, it is not foolish enough to suppose that study and practice have had nothing to do with the perfect consummation of the ragoût or the trifle. The common idea is, the more labour the less Genius; in other words, the greater the labour the worse the Art. The truth is exactly the opposite. Genius alone is capable of that ideal of perfection which causes the intense and incessant toil of the true artist; and Genius alone is capable of that patience of imagination which, seeing in the far distance the ideal form of its endeavour, accumulates by slow degrees out of the mass of rubbish that surrounds them, the grains of gold that are to build up its image.1 1 This was clearly very much Carlyle's view, whose famous dictum has suffered both by misquotation and extraction from its context. Thus in the Nineteenth Century, January 1887, Mr. Swinburne quotes the "infinite capacity for taking pains" as what "Carlyle professed to regard as the synonym of genius." This misconception of Carlyle's meaning has arisen from the following passsage in his Frederick the Great: "The good plan |