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temptuous moderns, come face to face with him. No, certainly, we cannot be laughing at Raphael's Apollo. Is it then at the fiddle? But why laugh at the fiddle? There is nothing absurd in a fiddle. If the good Saxon name shock you, call it, if you will, poetically,. viol; or musically, violin, tenor, alto-according to the pitch you judge it to have. To the eye the instrument handled by Apollo, though lacking the subtle curve, the sharp scooped flank of the perfected fiddle of Amati, or Guarneri, or Stradivari, is even in its. pre-Cremonese ungainliness more elegant in shape, and much more graceful of manipulation, above all, infinitely finer in tone than any lumbering antique stringed thing. To the imagination, on the other hand, it does not, or need not, present any grotesque images. Thereis nothing grotesque in the recollection of one of Haydn's quartets or one of Tartini's sonatas; nothing undignified or unpoetical surely in the thought that just such an instrument as this once rested against the moonlit armour, and whined beneath the reddened fingers of Volker the Fiddleman, as he sat with Hagen of Tronegg on the bench outside Queen Chriemhilt's hall, holding watch over the dreadful chamber where Huns and Burgundians lay slaughtered beneath the charred and fallen rafters; nothing unpoetic in the thought that just such an instrument as this is played on the carpeted steps of the Venetian altar-pieces by the angels at the feet of the Virgin, enthroned in solemn drapery of wine-lee and clove crimson in her tapestried niche, beneath the dangling silver lamps. and the garlands of melons and lilies and green leaves slung in heavy festoons. You do not laugh at the fiddle of Morone or Bellini's angels; you do not laugh at the fiddle of the Niebelung knight;: you do not laugh at the fiddle for which Haydn or Mozart composed. Why then laugh at this fiddling Apollo of Raphael's? In reality we are laughing neither at Apollo nor at the fiddle, but at the anachronism, the anomaly of their being thus united-the antique god and the medieval play-work. We are laughing at the mere name, the droll meeting of incongruous words, Apollo the Fiddler.' And as the name sinks into our mind there crowds forward a vague jumble of grotesque ideas-of Heinrich Heine's tales of exiled gods, of Bacchus turned convent cellarer, and Jove selling rabbitskins on Heligoland, and Mercury turned Dutch skipper, with pigtail instead of winged cap, and knobbed cane instead of Caduceus. Apollo the Fiddler! and there emerges from out of this confusion a vision. of Apollo wandering from fair to fair, and from pothouse to pothouse,. with his fiddle on his back; of Apollo screwing his pegs and waxing his bow among the clatter of plates and glasses, the cries of watermelon and pumpkin-seed sellers, the gabble of pedlars over their tapes and fans and mirrors, the shuffle and scramble and hum and yell of a village holiday; the vision of the god seated calmly, with dangling legs, on the side of some wooden stage, fiddling away in concert with earthly pipers and drummers until the curtain shall be drawn aside from some mystery play of Joseph and his Brethren,' or

The Three Kings from the East;' from some grand display of giantesses, or painted negroes, or camels bestridden by wrinkled, redjerkined monkeys. Why should we be thus haunted by grotesque images? why should we laugh where the men of the Renaissance merely enjoyed? Those humanists surely knew as well as we do what were and were not antique instruments; those men for whom the greatest art was produced surely knew as well as we do what was artistically right and what artistically wrong. Yet we laugh, and they did not. For, as we have already seen, those men did not let their knowledge of how things are or have been in reality, interfere with their enjoyment of how things are represented in art; they designed ornaments where we only label specimens; they did not habitually and perpetually, almost unconsciously and automatically, judge of all things from a scientific point of view.

From a scientific point of view? This assertion takes you somewhat aback, does it not, my friend? You, at least, you imagined, were safe from such an imputation. For you happen to be peculiarly unscientific, particularly artistic. You are (and not without a little pride thereat in your heart of hearts) a person whose artistic and imaginative nature is for ever being ruffled by the scientific spirit of the age. You hate all explanation, analysis; you recoil, almost as from some gritty or clammy contact, from the theories which attempt to explain your likings and dislikings; you are, even by your own confession, just a trifle cowardly in the presence of ideas and facts; you wish merely to feel and imagine, and to keep the luxurious sense of mystery and wonder. You are proudly conscious that your real home was not modern London, but ancient Athens or mediæval Florence; and being thus cruelly exiled into a land of desolation, you strive to build out of all manner of fragments of beauty and fancy and fashion, out of all manner of broken-down, long-inherited sounds and sights and images, some sort of retreat, half hermitage, half pleasure dome, where your soul can loll at its ease, secluded, peaceful, high above the smoke and smut and rattle of modern ideas. You have, in short, a vague, uncomfortable, instinctive aversion to science. And yet you, even you, are in this case, and in a thousand similar cases, judging and even condemning art from the point of view of science.

When we say science, we must define. There is science of all kinds, and some kinds have no possible chance of intruding into the domain of art. And, strange to say, these latter happen to be the very sciences you dislike most: those physical sciences, physiology, optics, acoustics, which teach other folk (for you decline being taught) why certain linear forms by requiring a painful adjustment of the visual muscles, and certain colour combinations by causing an excess of stimulus to the retinal nerves, and certain sequences and meetings of sounds by disintegrating with opposed movements the delicate mechanism of hearing, give us, each in its way, an impression called ugliness; while certain other combinations

of lines, of colours, and of sounds, induce the pleasurable sense of beauty: these natural sciences, which thus impertinently and coarsely explain the causes of artistic likings, do not attempt to influence those likings and dislikings themselves. For art deals only with the very surface of Nature; with that which she reveals to the naked eye and the unaided ear, with the combinations which require for their perception neither scalpel nor alembic nor logical mechanism of analysis. Our artistic sense of right and wrong is safely based in the structure of our organism, which science may explain, but which science cannot replace. It is from no knowledge of cell or tissue, of bone or muscle, of anything inside the human body, that we know when that body is comely and when it is uncouth. Our perception of line and colour, perhaps a collateral sense of weight and resistance, perhaps even a long engrained, long unanalytic, long instinctive, nay, automatic sense of fitness for the purposes of life-all these various senses, combined into what we call artistic perception, taught the Greek sculptors where to seek models for Aphrodite or Apollo long before the first profane knife had ever pried into the mysteries hidden beneath the more grand curves, the supple broken lines, the beautiful surface of the human body; knowledge of beauty, knowledge of the fair shapes and tints of man, and beasts, and plants, and rocks, and skies; knowledge of the sweet harmonies or melodies to be got out of pipe, or string, or throat-knowledge of beauty, though knowledge, most indisputably, is no more scientific knowledge than is the knowledge of virtue or vice. Science, with its analysis, can teach us what hidden reasons of physical benefit or injury, of social progress or degradation, have made us such as to prefer beauty to ugliness, good to evil; but science was not born when our remotest ancestors already preferred beauty to ugliness, good to evil, and thought that the preference, the knowledge, was the pressure of some guiding angel's hand, the mysterious voice of some unseen divinity. This sort of science, therefore, physical and physicomental, which explains the functions by the structure and the structure by the function of things, has therefore no power of meddling with art; for the sculptor knows before the anatomist when a limb is misshapen; and the musician has perceived that a chord is insupportable long before the physicist can begin analysing his air

waves.

No; it is not this science which you æsthetic sybarites dislike, not those coarse matter-of-fact physical sciences which can and do impertinently interfere with art. It is those far vaguer, less scientific sciences, historical and geographical, which with their charm of colour and incident, their stimulus to fancy and emotion, have become one of the luxuries of your life, making you forget almost that they are sciences at all; as in some picturesque museum, where furniture and plate are grouped into habitable rooms, and armour and musical instruments look as if only now thrown aside; or in some great greenhouse, where spreading palms and huge ferns hide the glass and ironwork, and flowering parasites half impede the way,

you may forget that all things are so many scientific spoils, so many specimens collected and arranged by historian or geographer.

These geographic and historic sciences, which you look upon as if they were scarcely sciences at all, have in reality no connection whatever with our perceptions of beauty and ugliness; their range of explanation does not contain any of the phenomena of artistic preference. As the physical sciences explain the structural reasons of our pleasure or displeasure at certain artistic forms, so the geographico-historical sciences explain why given countries and ages have produced one kind of artistic form rather than another. The one set of sciences gives the reason for the impression being received by the spectator; the other set of sciences gives the reason for that impression being conveyed by the artist. But the geographico-historical sciences, which teach us that the Greeks modelled beautiful naked figures because they greatly practised athletic exercises; and that the Venetians were excellent colourists because they lived in sea-marsh land and traded with the East; these geographico-historic sciences approach less near to the real artistic problems of right and wrong than do those physical sciences which teach us at least the configuration of our eye, which make the bosses of Greek sculpture and the tints of Venetian draperies specially agreeable to us. Yet, while physiology, optics, acoustics, never venture upon interfering in our artistic judgments, the geographico-historical sciences, which cannot even explain the physical basis of our artistic impressions, are for ever stepping in and telling us that in a picture, a statue, or an opera, this, that, or the other is right or wrong. Nay, it is they, these irrelevant sciences of date and place, which, while our artistic perceptions are perfectly delighted, will cry out that we ought to condemn some anachronism; it is they which, in the midst of our admiration for Raphael's Parnassus, evoke that whole procession of ludicrous images, and burst out laughing at the Fiddling Apollo.

Yes; and they have made us laugh at many other things. At Mozart and Rossini's Romans and Assyrians singing roulades and declaiming accompanied by orchestral flourishes, like so many Corydons and Chloes, in the Forum or at Nineveh; they will make us laugh at half the paintings of the Renaissance; they may make us laugh some day at Shakespeare's jumble of Athenian dukes and London tradesmen and fairy-land fairies. The laughing is, however, the least harm they have done; for after all, when we have laughed at Raphael or Mozart or Shakespeare, we are still obliged to enjoy and to admire. We are not smitten blind or deaf for our sacrilege, and the great artists are avenged by our ignominiously returning to the very things we scorned. But our scientific habits, our habits of always knowing how and when and where everything happened, have made us believe that it is a special mission of modern art to make up for the anachronisms and anomalies of former days by becoming in a way the illustrator, with colours, sounds, and words, of the reality of things as we now suppose it to have been. Historical painting, which in former days had nothing whatever to do with history, and

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calmly presented us with Romans and Egyptians and Hebrews in slashed jerkins and pointed shoes, has in our time become historical in all good sooth; poetry, which used to put into the hearts and mouths of men and women of distant countries and bygone ages the passions and words of the poet and his own contemporaries, now elaborates and studies and imitates sentiments which we fortunately can no longer even conceive, words of which the real sense has happily grown obsolete to us. Nay, music, which would seem the most ungeographic and unhistorical of all arts, has succeeded, as critics tell us, in giving us historic opera;' and even, as an enthusiastic Frenchman declared about the Aïda' of Verdi, in delighting us no longer with mere empty melodies and harmonies, but with the vision of ancient Egypt, with its pyramids and mummies, its priests and its warriors, its desert sand and Nile mud, and all the mysteries of its mixed mysterious races. All this may seem exaggeration, and indeed, when such aims and pretensions are distinctly formulated, there are few of us in whom they will not occasion a smile. Yet in point of fact we are constantly acting and judging according to these ideas; painters turn their studios into perfect museums, and wander all over Syria and Egypt before attempting some subject which to Michael Angelo or Leonardo would have presented nothing beyond a problem of anatomy or of light and shade. Musicians collect and print huge volumes of the rude chants of distant peoples and times, in order that composers, when on the point of writing an opera, may know exactly where to look for the proper local colour. And as to poets -have they not turned of late into perfect rhymed Michelets and Froudes, requiring for their proper criticism no longer literary critics, but keepers of State Records?

What harm is there in all this? you may ask. Granting its uselessness, is it not a mere amusing mania? Not so; and for several reasons. First, because art must suffer in its essentials as soon as it is made subservient to some extra-artistic interest; because all this elaborate doing of things scientific prevents the simple doing of things artistic. For when a painter, well versed in Oriental realities, has made of what some ignoramus of Florence or Venice or Antwerp would have made into a grand display of beautiful figures, faces, and draperies, a something closely resembling, in its rows of flopping, veil-muffled, and shawl-huddled Egyptians or Syrians, a number of clothes-bags in process of being emptied, the art of painting and the æsthetical cravings of mankind are not very much the gainers thereby. When a musician introduces into an opera elaborate imitations of the music of centuries and peoples who had no real music at all, his work is not much improved thereby. Worst of all, when a poet has reproduced effects, modes of thought and feeling, he has not only given us things with which neither he nor his reader can really sympathise, but he has at the same time cheated us of the expression of his own and our real emotions, which, in their quivering reality, can force the sympathy even of men to whom those emotions may have

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