thing of highest importance, and if, as the typical æsthete holds, experience in crime can improve art's quality, then the æsthetes have provided themselves with a justification for their crimes. But it is a devilish delusion that a vile or wicked life can improve any of the products of genius. Mr. Mabie is right in saying that

the artist never lived who violated the laws of life, moral or physical, without damage to the quality of his genius, and to the value of his work. A man may come out of the gutter as one has come in our time, to sing a song or shape a lyric, but no man ever came out of the gutter to write the Divine Comedy or Shakespeare's masterpieces. One cannot do or see great things without perfect health of body, mind, and soul. There is only one road to greatness, and that is the road of character. If we lose the purity and sincerity and innocence of the child, we may still do technically clever and artistically flashy things, but we will cease to do great things because the power to conceive them will have passed from us.

Oscar Wilde's extravagant praise of Paul Verlaine is what might be expected from him, but no great or healthy work could possibly come from a man of Verlaine's habits, all of whose writings were a product of the heady fumes of wine. When the powerful excitement of his revel was at its height, Verlaine wrote with fiery force things vulgar and impure. In the weak, tremulous state of reaction and remorse which follows prolonged debauch, he attempted devotional poetry. But his alleged spirituality is almost as unwholesome as his sensuality. Virtue and temperance and health are essential to the production of great art. This is one reason why there is so little that is great in current French literature; and this is why when an Oxford undergraduate expatiated to Dr. Jowett on the charms of a typical French novel, the master of Balliol said to the student: "What sentence is written above the entrance to hell?" "Abandon hope, all ye that enter here,'" replied the young man. "No," said Jowett, "it is 'Ici on parle Français.""

Naturally, the æsthetes freely condone, or rather ignore, the crimes of their champion and chief, and would like to restore him to his pedestal and publicly reassemble his worshipers about his feet. So much as this their very principles require of them. A Capuchin monk once said to one of Renan's friends: "He has done many evil things, your friend Renan, many evil things; but he has spoken well of Saint Francis, and Saint Francis will arrange all that." With similar condonation would the artistic guild say of Oscar Wilde: "He has done many evil things, but he has spoken well and

written finely about Beauty; therefore he holds a place in the Valhalla of æstheticism among the heroes and champions of the Beautiful." And if what Mr. Chesterton says is true, some amends should be made to Oscar Wilde. Chesterton thinks society treated Wilde unfairly, inasmuch as it encouraged him for years in preaching an immoral attitude by fêting and lionizing him while he was posing as the leader and teacher of the æsthetes; and then when he took to practicing the immoral attitude he had preached, society closed in on him and restrained his active immoralities by means of handcuffs and prison cells. Mr. Chesterton fails to think clearly. He should discriminate. The people who for years fêted Wilde for preaching immorality were not the people who arrested him when caught in the flagrant criminal act. The lionizing was done by a coterie of self-demoralized æsthetes and their following; the punishing was done by the official agents of the great sane, majestic moral sense of the community sturdily bent on enforcing decency. Society took no harsh exceptional or inconsistent course in Wilde's case. A free community is always tolerant of mere theories, however pernicious, immoral, or destructive; but when the theorist puts his objectionable and injurious theories into practice by overt acts, then he encounters the teeth of the effective machinery which society maintains for its own protection and which does not discriminate between æsthetes and other anarchists. When Chesterton charges society with unfairness toward Oscar Wilde he errs through his failure to discriminate between a coterie and the community. But he is perfectly correct in saying that what this chief of the æsthetes did was simply to carry out in practice the doctrines of his cult. He lived his principles to the full, and so he became the consummate flower of æstheticism. Usually it is some weak-minded or unbalanced disciple of destructive theories that is rash enough to perpetrate the extreme overt act logically enjoined by the evil teaching, as when Czolgosz, fired by what he has heard at anarchist meetings or read in yellow journals, goes out to do the act which the teachings of the leaders suggest and justify. But in the case of the æsthetes, those anarchists against the moral law, it is their chief prophet, apostle, and teacher who has the nerve, the reckless daring to practice what he preaches and to live down to the principles they all uphold.

Nothing is plainer than the superficiality and futility of æstheticism as a means of culture. What proof more positive of its superficiality is possible than the æsthete of Reading Gaol who, having

devoted his life to cultivating his æsthetic taste to the last degree of exquisiteness, at the height of his career knows as little of true refinement as a tree-toad knows of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. That the man who was the consummate flower and the complete embodiment of æstheticism could be at once so dainty and so dirty, so squeamish and so squalid, so nice and so nasty, is proof that the refinement of a merely æsthetic culture goes not much deeper than does the rouge on a courtesan's enameled cheek. As to its futility, the words of a bright Englishman are true: "This is the carpe diem philosophy; but the carpe diem philosophy is not the philosophy of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw: and great joy has in it the sense of immortality. . . . No blow has ever been struck at the natural loves and laughter of men so sterilizing and paralyzing as this carpe diem of the æsthetes." Both the superficiality and the futility of æstheticism are conspicuous and pitiable. It fails so entirely with both lobes of its brain that one can hardly imagine how unsuccess could be more complete. Starting out with the principle of sacrificing all things to the pursuit of pleasure, it ends by achieving as its most obvious result in its typical case the most phenomenal and excruciating misery. And beginning by excluding all considerations and aims except the production of beautiful works of art, it ends, as a brilliant critic tells us, by having no art worth showing. "There are many real tragedies of the æsthetic world and the artistic temperament," says this critic, "but the greatest tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art." We should not count this to be æstheticism's worst tragedy, but he states correctly the utter futility of the æsthete's misguided endeavor.

The poison of æstheticism accounts largely for the inferiority and viciousness of modern art. Critics who are not of the clergy,

and who know more about the matter than we can, report that demoralization is nearly complete in the art world. We are told that most of the artists of today hold the doctrines of sheer thoroughgoing æstheticism. With cynical disregard of moral considerations, they regard in any work of art only the artistic content. "Art for art's sake" is their intentionally and explicitly immoral motto. James Huneker, the special critic of musical and dramatic art, says that the puzzling thing about the new dispensation in art is its absolute departure from the ethics of Christianity; and its substitu

tion of the ethics of Spinoza ravished by the rhetoric of Nietzsche, who called himself the great immoralist, denied the soul, and proclaimed the rank animalism of man. The moral dangers of the art world and the whole æsthetic realm must be considered real, and not the nightmare of a preacher's indigestion, when even a decadent like George Moore says he does not believe that the moral sense can flourish in an artistic atmosphere, and that modern art as it exists is positively unfriendly to morals. Art as the handmaid of religion and morality, as in the great old days of Angelo, and Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Fra Angelico, was one of the most glorious accessories, embellishments, and inspirations of civilized life. But art estranged from morals and religion, as in these degenerate and erring days, sinks to mediocrity and pettiness and develops the seeds of decay and death: becomes, in fact, a plague and a pestilence against which society needs to put up a quarantine.

In no department of the world of art has morality flourished less than in the dramatic. In spite of all the talk about reforming the stage, the best dramatic critics tell us that the theater today is disgraced by plays which are a "dramatized stench," and which frankly represent a life of filthy vice as better than a life of honest toil. The corrupting influence of the theater and the tendency of dramatic art to degenerate are seen in the fact that a man who set out a short time ago to reform the stage, and wrote what he called "Plays for Puritans," after a while offered the public a drama which shocked the sensibilities of a Tammany chief of police and was prohibited by that not over-scrupulous functionary. Last winter, in New York, out of the realm of art came the ghost of Reading Gaol to flap its obscene wings over the Metropolitan Opera House with a play wallowing in lasciviousness and reeking with suffocating moral stench, Oscar Wilde's opera of Salome, which a capable and dispassionate critic says should be staged nowhere outside of Sodom. Out of the realm of art came also the ghost of Madison Square Garden, to hover by day for months over the City Court, flitting by night perchance above the temple and the pleasure-palace he designed, his House of Worship and his House of Mirth, on the inner wall of one of which stand the commandments, God Almighty's "Thou-shalt-nots" which he put there, while on the roof of the other weeping angels see the little red pool which his murderer spilled there. Estheticism is not justified of its children. To repudiate morals. and to glorify the senses is to insure disease, death, putrefaction.

THE ARENA

A NEW EXPOSITION.

MUCH critical skill has been used to prove the first two chapters of Luke unhistorical. It is generally admitted, however, that Luke is the most accurate Greek scholar and historian of all the New Testament writers, he being the only one among them who was a native Greek, the others being Jews. But his plain and straightforward account of the virgin birth of Christ has been a stubborn rock of offense in the way of the rationalist and the skeptic; they have of late, however, indulged in much self-adulation in the supposition which they think is founded on historical facts that the first two chapters are merely legendary and mythical. They affirm that Luke is mistaken when he says in the second chapter and second verse that Quirinius was at the time of the birth of Christ governor of Syria.

Luke speaks of two enrollments: the first in his Gospel, second chapter, second verse, the second in the Acts, fifth chapter, thirty-seventh verse. The second was according to Josephus about A. D. 6, 7, when Judea was attached to Syria, which would make it about ten years between the two censuses, as we call them now in the United States. Luke in the Gospel and in the Acts uses the same Greek word, apographa, which does not mean an "assessment," or "taxing," but a "registration," or "enrollment," or "writing." And these enrollments were not of the people alone, but of their substance as well.

Luke does not say that at the second enrollment Quirinius was governor of Syria. And Josephus does not allude to the birth of Christ at all; neither does he say that Quirinius was governor of Syria or Judea at any time. Quirinius by this time had gained great fame as a Roman consul, a legate, a high military officer or commander, and had been sent often to quiet and settle many disturbances in different countries. So here Cæsar sent him down into Syria as a military and not a civil officer to oversee the enrollment. We assert, after considerable investigation, that Quirinius never was in our sense of the word governor of Syria or Judea. The Greek word used by Luke is agamon, and it is a military and not a civil term, and signifies a "high military officer" such as general, commander, lieutenant. The first English translators so translated it. Wiclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, and the Geneva versions all use the word "lieutenant." The Syriac and the Vulgate and the Rheims use the word "president"; that is, he was sent to preside as a temporary military officer over the censustaking. But the King James version is the first to use the word "governor." And this erroneous translation has caused commentators and critics more fruitless research and skeptics more pleasure and satisfaction than perhaps any other passage in the New Testament.

We may remark further that to parenthesize verse second is not sustained by universal authority. Westcott and Hort, who follow too exclusively the Sinaitic manuscript, use it, but it is worth calling attention