Joyous Gard

about the relation of art to morals, and whether the artist or the poet ought to attempt to teach anything. It makes a good kind of

ach anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no artist ought ever to attempt to teach anything, with

ists must be for ever condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art cannot help feeling that it is the one thing worth doing in the world; and the artist whose soul is set upon fine hues and forms thinks that conduct must take car

oblems of life, and judged everything by a standard of beauty. The Jews, of course, at least in their early history, had the same fiery interest in questions

lfully upon the sentimental emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used tragic passions for the amusement of a theatre. Aristotle disagreed with Plato about this, and held that poetry was not exactly moral teaching, but that it disposed the mind to consider moral problems as interesting. He said that in looking on at a play, a spectator suffered, so to speak, by deputy, but all the same learned directly, if unconsciously, the beauty of virtue. When we come to our own Elizabethans, there is no evidence t

m not now speaking of those who write basely and crudely, to please a popular taste. They have their reward;

ing that a man can do, because he thus courts derision; indeed, if there is a bad sign of the world's temper just now, it is that men will listen to politicians, scientists, men of commerce, and journalists, becaus

egins to try to produce improving things, one goes off the line. But in England there has been of late a remarkable fusion of morality and art. Ruskin and Browning are clear enough proof that it is possible to be passionately interested in moral prob

f fire, which was moral rather than intellectual; Jowett had a power of putting a suggestive brilliancy into dull words and stale phrases, showing that they were but the crystallised formulas of ideas, which men had found wonderful or beautiful. The secret of such teaching is quite incommunicable, but it is a very high sort of art. There are many men who feel the inspiration of knowledge very

rilling that are necessary to be made free of the secret. He brings out, as Plato beautifully said, "the beauty which meets the spirit like a breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason." The work of the

son told me, that Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a solitary voyage, came to see him; he himself was going to start on a journey the following day, and had to visit the lumber-room to get out his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and, sitting on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we most of us find to

motional poverty is what we most of us have to dread, and we must make investments if we wish for revenues. We are many of us hampered, as I have said, by the dreariness and dulness of t

because we must advance upon the slender line of our own interests; but we can surely find some one writer who revives us and inspires us; and if we persevere, we find the path slowly broadening into a road, while the landscape takes shape and design around us. The one thing fortunately of which there is enough and to spare in the world is good advice, and if we find ourselves helpless, we can consult some one who seems to have a view of finer things, whose delight is fresh and eager, whose handling of

natural lot of man. But the realm of thought is a very free citizenship, and a hundred doors will open to us if we only knock at them. Moreover, that realm is not like an over-populated country; it is infinitely large, and virgin soil; and we have only to stake out our claim; and then, if we persevere, we shall find that our Joyous Gard is really rising into the air about us-where else should we build our castles?-with all the glory of tower and gable, of curtain-w