end is not to make us view the triumph of crime or treachery with complacency or exultation; that he is on the side of right and nobility; and the pathetic awe excited in the spectator at a tragic conclusion is in all the greatest dramas accompanied with a revulsion of the conscience, which vindicates the ultimate triumph of justice and virtue in spite of failure in the individual instance. We recognise the truth and the mystery of the temporary dominion of sorrow.

The influence on the mind of all the greatest works of art is moral, or conducive to a higher moral aim; the more of the highest aspirations of man which a work contains, admitting that these are expressed in anything like an adequate manner, and asserting also that the higher the aim the more difficult will be the execution, the grander will be the work. In sculpture, for example, the finest statue in existence is the Apollo Belvidere, a representation of the god of life and light, and the fountain-head of all poetry. Can it be imagined that any power of art could personify Hercules, or Cacus, or even Pluto, in the same divine fashion? In painting, Raphael and Titian have produced their masterpieces by fixing on the canvas the divine ideal of womanhood created by the middle ages and glorified by religious chivalry. The two greatest modern epics have each a divine subject. It would not be difficult to show that Homer himself is a moral poet; and if we knew the actual condition of manners in primeval Greece, he would in all probability appear far more moral than is now the case. As for the Eneid, that too has a religious subject, and the hero of the poem, though inadequately rendered, was intended to represent a perfect type of the patriarch and priest of primeval times. Schiller has drawn his noblest inspirations from the depths of a surpassing moral nature. Nor can the champions of art for art's sake claim Goethe on their side, though his moral aspiration was less predominant than that of Schiller above the faculties of the mind.

There is a poetry, without question, of doubt and despair, characteristic of the state of the European mind for the last half century. Even Lamartine has written his Désespoir; and in Byron and Alfred de Musset there is plenty of similar poetry. But there are visions of higher hope even in Byron and Alfred de Musset; nevertheless, they would have been greater poets, had they been able to express more equally both aspects of the struggle of good and evil in man's destiny; the nobler and more complete nature is that which passes through such crises of existence to a moral state of a more reverent and hopeful character, as Goethe did, after the production of Werther. All that can be conceded to those who assert that the beauty of a poem is not connected with morality is, that morality alone will not make verse a poem, that the didactic tone is to be avoided, that should not be turned into a sermon in rhyme, and that weak poetry of the moral sort is tedious, though not so tedious or

a poem

repulsive as immoral poetry of the same strength. The corrupt and the horrible, it may be conceded, likewise may find a place in poetry, but still subject to the laws of good taste. The darker and lower elements of nature and life, and the vilest of passions, may undoubtedly, within certain limits, be exhibited in verse, otherwise poetry, which on the whole is a glorified vision of all existence, would not be a complete representation; but all who have any care for the advancement of man's intellectual welfare are interested in condemning a theory which declares, like the witches in Macbeth, that fair is foul and foul is fair;' and unhappy must be the destiny of any poet who exerts his whole or even his greatest power in glorifying the corrupt and the baser instincts of man, whose productions fill the soul with darkness instead of light.

Yet, as far as regards Baudelaire, it cannot be denied that fleeting gleams of better convictions than those to which he has given his main energies are to be found in his verse and prose. We cannot accept the fatalistic conclusion that Baudelaire was necessarily what he was, and could be no other; it is a question how far external influences, and a more wholesome social and intellectual atmosphere, might have aided in saving from wreck a man who certainly had an intellect worth the saving. But to confine our attention to Baudelaire himself: when we find such a phrase as the following in his pages, it seems strange that a man who could so write should not also see that his theories of art and his fashion of writing poetry were a violation of that moral beauty and of that universal rhythm and prosody of the order of the world of which he speaks: Le vice porte atteinte au juste et au vrai, révolte l'intellect et la conscience. Mais comme outrage à l'harmonie, comme dissonance il blessera plus particulièrement certains esprits poétiques, et je ne crois pas qu'il soit scandalisant de considérer toute infraction à la morale, au beau moral, comme une espèce de faute contre le rhythme et la prosodie universels.'

Had Baudelaire aimed at making his work, even in incomplete fashion, a mirror of this universal rhythm and prosody, of which he seems to have had an idea, his readers would have had to sup less full of horrors in the perusal of his volume, and he would, without doubt, have taken a higher, and perhaps a permanent, place in the literature of his country. However, as Keats writes,

Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers,
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers,'

let us trust that these Fleurs du Mal, these 'poison-flowers,' may have served, and may serve, some purpose ere they die away. They might even by the very antagonism they are calculated to excite in a truly poetic mind serve a moral purpose, to the discomfiture of the partisans of the author's philosophy of art.

WILLIAM STIGAND.

THE SHADOW AND THE RING

'MAY I not see thee once again,

Fair face-not once? Ay me, no word replies.

My love will change! Nay, my long love, though vain,
Is one with rising fire and falling rain,

And cannot change until thy lover dies,
Fair face, too full of shine for my faint eyes!

Always to me indeed must seem
Idalia's boy most dear: night's pregnant hours

Have never form'd a face more dear in dream,
Whose strange low voice is like a singing stream;
Whose breath is balm, which after early showers.
Lies fast enfolded in thick leaves of flowers.

Ah, sweet! shall we not worship LoveLove who is worshipp'd ever in every land?

Still art thou dumb: lend me at least thy glove, Which may of thee glad memories in me moveThy glove, thy ring, some ribbon, or small band, Made holy by the warm touch of thy hand.

Nay, by thy genius do I swear,

By all great oaths which grow in poet's rhyme,
Almost methinks this love of mine a snare,
Where Death lurks in disguise.

Hast thou no care

For me, sad soul, caught in Love's luscious lime ?
Serves but my woe to while away thy time?'

So pleaded he, with words as fire
Warm, and unceasing as a winter snow,

No Lenten lover, and would never tire,
More garrulous than ever yet was choir
Of grasshoppers,-and when she answer'd, No,'
They ebbed awhile, faster again to flow.

So pleading, while she still said 'Nay,'

6

He took her ring, which when she took again

He had changed for his, the falling light of day
Made small their difference,-nor sought more stay,

But left her half in joy, yet, being fain

That he should linger longer, half in pain.

SECOND SERIES, VOL. V. F.S. VOL. XV.

GG