love of incompleteness, uncertainty, and darkness. He pushed one truth persistently forward, unwelcome as it generally was, that the highest achievement of all is to be clear as well as deep; complete as well as suggestive; strong as well as sad. It is nobler to suffer than not to feel; but it is noblest of all to surmount the suffering and win through to joy. Conquered anguish; joy triumphant over pain; perfection and life victors over weakness and death; these are to him the noblest artistic themes, while the chief aim of modern art is, in his mind, to cover ruins, to sow flowers over the cave which is filled with empty desires. To the distinction of Apollinistic and Dionystic art suc ceeds now another category, with its division into the art which is born of Sehnsucht, of need and longing, and the art which is begotten of Ueberfluss, of strength and fulness. Some men write and paint and compose because they are seeking and striving; because they would attain but have not attained. Others let fall the fruits of their own strength and abundance, fruits as finished and perfect as the tree from which they fall. Speaking of a musical composer, Nietzsche says: "He has the melancholy of impotence; he creates, not from fulness but from his thirst for fulness all he really possesses is his own hunger." + The last and the highest aim of art is the representation of "the permanent, restful, lofty, and simple"; and the true masters "are to be recognized in that they know, in little as in great, how to conduct their work to a perfect end."§ It is the trait to which we have already grown accustomed, the "will to be strong," manifested now in his conception of art, as we have already seen it manifested in the conduct of his life. It is difficult to imagine what would become of our modern art and literature if they were to be cut off from their ordinary source of inspiration, and from the depicting of want and sorrow, both subjective and objective. And yet Nietzsche's theory would probably furnish the touchstone by which to test and judge what is really decadent. Except to a few fullblooded poets of "too, too solid flesh," this world is hardly at fit studio for the production of wholly perfect forms, of wholly happy scenes. But it is one thing to depict sorrow, and it is "Menschliches, allzu Menschliches. B. II. 172. Der Fall Wagner. P. 46. § Fröhliche Wissenschaft. P. 281. another thing to depict it simply because we ourselves are sorrowful; and Nietzsche's idea was that an artist must be master of his own impressions before he can give them the highest artistic rendering. The last note should be of triumph, and not of despair. There is no doubt that, stoutly as he would have denied it, Nietzsche was, in this second period, on the whole, antiDionystic. The essence of Dionystic genius is that it should rise from a hidden, unfathomable source; when we demand of the artist absolute self-possession and transparent lucidity, this fountain is inevitably sealed. An artist then becomes, as Nietzsche has so often represented him, a retrograde utilitarian; and a man of genius is, quite contrarily to his former conception, an abortive savant. Ruthlessly, and often falsely, he now points out the spot of materialism, and the taint of animal self-seeking in our most spiritual aspirations. Later on he might have said that he saved the cause of Dionystic art by the unlimited dimensions which he conferred upon the ego; if self be coextensive with the universe, then we may be wholly self-contained and yet also Dionystic and universal. But the cause of art is, in fact, hopelessly impoverished by his stern denial of that which had once been to him the fountain of living water. His criticism was strong and wholesome in its steady repression of dilettantism, of the pseudoinspiration that really springs from vagueness and ignorance, from half-felt emotion and from half-apprehended ideas. But, like his superman, what we may call his super-art was not for this world. It was a hint of something which may, one day, be ours, when we can attain the fulness of life without suffering, and the fulness of strength without sin. III. ART FOR ART'S SAKE. There is a considerable and influential school to whom the principle of "art for art's sake," of its moral indifference and absolute rights, is a fundamental principle. To them the law of beauty is the law of life, and to the artistic temperament nothing is forbidden or unclean. Although we may be entirely convinced that there is something false and dangerous in this doctrine, and although the general philosophy of the men who propound it may sufficiently taint it with an anti-religious character to justify our suspicions, let us own frankly that it is not easy, from a merely superficial consideration, to prove it entirely wrong. There is something imperative in beauty as in truth; something ultimate and compelling, in presence of which we can no more refuse our tribute of admiration and joy than we can withhold our intellectual assent from an evident scientific proposition. And now, when we understand art in the sense which it bore for Nietzsche in his early works, a sense which it has borne also for the greatest artistic minds of the world, it becomes questionable whether we need quarrel with the principle at all; whether "art for art's sake" may not be as justifiable a doctrine as "truth for truth's sake," or "good for good's sake." It becomes also a question whether the above-mentioned school are wrong in the proposition they put forward, or are wrong merely in the conception they have formed of the terms which compose it; in which case our quarrel would be with their notion of art, and not with their assertion in regard to it. They say that art is non moral, but need we be scandalized, since there is a sense in which religion also is non-moral? dealing, as it does, with ultimate realities, and not with the laws of our process towards them. The supreme law of love in religion, in its super-moral aspect, is not so unlike the supreme law of beauty in art; is there not then some point of eternal necessity to which both ultimately converge ? Art would then be, not the enemy of religion, nor yet her handmaid, but just another bridge, springing from the sense of beauty in man, and leading to the source of beauty in God. If it is non-moral, it is also non-material; it is a revelation of the spiritual aspect of life as opposed to the Diesseits, its immediate, practical, and purely individual aspect. But now surely we have struck on the barrier which divides art, in this its eternal and universal sense, from the art which is glorified by our modern decadents. To these men art is a mere adornment of their own lives; a means by which they may either express, if they be reproductive, or relieve, if they be receptive, their own moods and desires. They will depend largely for their success, not on their power of going out of themselves, but on the very force of their self-concentration; weaken the springs of their egoism and you lessen the stream of their invention. "Art for art's sake" becomes to them a principle of license and unbounded self-indulgence. The law of beauty is not, in reality, supreme, but subordinate to the law of personal inclination. "The misty mountain winds "* will not "be free to blow against them," but will only be admitted, through scented curtains, into a well warmed and luxurious chamber. But eternal art, in the service of eternal beauty, has a very different demand to make. A Kempis himself hardly asks for more entire abnegation than is manifested in the self-restraint of the highest works of art. The self-restraint is non-moral, but it is self-restraint none the less. Nor need it startle and perplex us to find that the ultimate laws of the spirit-life reveal themselves, different yet the same, in æsthetics as in religion; that the individual still finds himself in presence of the same necessity, that of bringing himself and his work into their right relation to the whole. Here is the task on which his self-restraint is to be expended, whether in religion or in art. The truths unveiled by either are so immense in their demands, that frivolity and license and dilettantism shrivel at their sight. Their claim is so all-comprehensive and so exclusive, that the details of law are lost sight of and forgotten, only because they are swallowed and summed up in something greater. "Love and do as you will," sounds an easy commandment, but expresses indeed a state of the highest religious attainment. It is a claim on the entire life, while the particular moral precepts are, each of them, a demand on some part of it. And so too the principle "art for art's sake," in its call for utter self-immolation in the cause of everlasting beauty! In the midst of his own delight the true artist hears, like the voice of conscience, the summons onward and upward. He must not repose in a single theme, but must weave it continually into a greater whole. He is providing for an everlasting hunger, as Nietzsche says of Wagner, not for a passing appetite. But, as it would be grotesque to apply the dictum of St. Augustine to the earth-bound soul, that is fenced in by its own selfish desires and limitations, so is it false when we hear this other motto from the lips of those who use a lesser conception of art for their own personal ends, and have not sacrificed themselves in the service of a beauty which is resistless as fate, because it is eternal as love and truth. Lines above Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth. MR. MALLOCK ON THE NATURALNESS OF CHRISTIANITY BY WILLIAM L. SULLIVAN, C.S.P. N a recent magazine article, Mr. W. H. Mallock turns his ready and restless pen to maintaining that Christianity is not an original, unique, or supernatural religion; but that, on the contrary, it arose quite in the normal order of things, as a natural product of the age in which it first appeared. Christianity, he says, has all the marks and signs of human manufacture that all the other systems possess which were contemporary with its origin. If it teaches an exalted morality, so do Epictetus and his fellow-Stoics. If it has a noble view of human brotherhood, so has Seneca. If it insists upon self-control and self-sacrifice, still more does Buddha. If it possesses an extensive apparatus of rite, ceremony, and sacrament, so had the religion of Mithra before it. Why, then, should Christianity alone be admitted into the category of the supernatural, and its living likenesses, Stoicism, Buddhism, and Mithraism be thrust into the outer darkness of the merely natural? Christianity," argues Mr. Mallock, "regarded under one of its aspects, must necessarily present itself, even to the most orthodox Christians, as a purely natural religion competing with many others and not generically distinguishable, so far as its origins are concerned, from the religions of Zoroaster, of Gautama, of the neo-Platonists, or of Mahomet, to which every element of the supernatural is by Christians indignantly denied." "Christianity, then," he says in another passage, "even in respect to those details which have commonly been supposed to stamp it as a thing apart, can no longer be regarded as a religion which is alone in its kind." Doubtless in the back end of Mr. Mallock's mind, a mind as difficult to explore as any that we know of among living men, he holds some purpose of defending Christianity in all this. For he always wishes, he contends, not to attack religion, but |