patient, heroic hope of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, enduring through clouds and darkness, through disillusion and solitude, till it "creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates"; Love, strong, tender and faithful, comforting life along the rough upward way, braving death, and finally triumphant over Time and Death. Truths, all of them, as old as mankind-and as new:have we always known and remembered them so well that we have no need of symbols to bring them home to us? On the pictures having special reference to particular aspects of modern life and thought we need not dwell, for as the painter himself has told us in his Prefatory Note to the catalogue of his works exhibited in 1896-7, "they require no explanation." Many of them, like Mammon and For he had Great Possessions, both in the Tate Gallery, deal with the question of wealth and its responsibilites. Not unconnected, I think, with this subject is the Condottiere,1 a wonderful character study. Keen, cold, and ruthless, grasping his leathern purse with both hands, utterly indifferent as to the banner he serves under, if only he be well paid, he is the very type of the unscrupulous soldier of fortune in all ages, whether he fight with a sword of steel or of gold; in a free company or a joint-stock one. But let no one imagine that Mr. Watts was a sentimentalist or an advocate of economic Utopias: it is not Capital, but Greed, that he condemns; not wealth, but the wrong use and distribution of it. Nor is covetousness the only sin reproved by this modern prophet. Many women, I hope, will remember his Angel of Pity, exhibited, if my memory serves me aright, two years ago in the New Gallery and now at Compton, a touching and eloquent sermon against the thoughtless, or worse than thoughtless, cruelty inflicted on helpless creatures by personal vanity and the tyranny of fashion. Turning to another class of pictures, The Eve of Peace, painted in 1863, always seems to me one of Mr. Watts's most characteristic, suggestive, and helpful works. The picture is quite Titianesque in its dignity and rich, harmonious colour. A warrior, not young, but still in the prime of life, is standing under a chestnut tree, not in exultant pride of victory, but in solemn thought, with bowed head, and holding his sword and helmet in his hands. The warfare has been a strenuous one, perhaps with other and fiercer foes than those from without; but the victory is won, and peace, though scarcely attained, is in sight-a lasting peace, we feel sure: "For what we win and hold is through some strife." Ruskin has said that: "Whatever is rightly called music, or Now in the Gallery at Compton. work of the Muses, is divine in help and healing," and this is true of all the best art, by which term I mean not painting only, but literature and music as well-whatever, in short, has for its aim the expression of an idea by means of symbols appealing to the imagination. The art whose last word is not one of bracing or healing is never the highest. For as the end of man's life is action, so the end of art is to fit him for action, and it does this by making him feel deeply and see rightly. We are so apt to get one-sided views of things without intending or even being aware of it: the very keenness of our interest in any question often prevents our seeing it in its true proportion and bearings and so lessens the practical utility of our attempts to deal with it. Art cannot solve the problems of life, but it can and does show them to us under aspects which we had missed or disregarded, and the highest art does more than this: it shows us a standpoint from which we may obtain a larger and juster view of them, and thus, while it inspires us to seek their solution, it helps us to choose the best means of finding it, according to our power and opportunities. Hence the importance of the artist being a true prophet. In one sense every true artist is a prophet, for to prophesy, as we have seen, is to interpret, and interpretation is the very soul of art. Mere realism, whether on canvas or on the printed page or score, is not properly art; neither is mere impressionism. The first is, at best an imitation, at worst a parody; the second is a form of that emotionalism which is so marked a characteristic of our time, and which is no less dangerous in the sphere of art than in that of religion, morals, or politics. In the stricter and peculiar sense of the word, however, the gift of prophecy, which is genius, is the rarest of all gifts, nor is it bestowed on all in equal measure. Of those privileged ones to whom it is given there are, alas, too many who pervert and misuse it; false prophets who call darkness. light and light darkness. Others again, like Lancelot, see the Sangreal from afar, but may not draw near to it, for their quest is not free from some taint of self-seeking. Yet they have seen that they have seen. But the perfect achievement of the Sangreal, with the healing power that belongs to it, was, and is, for those alone who in singleness of heart have willed not only to see, but to follow it—not, as in the old legend, by leaving the world, but rather by living faithful to it in the world, prophesying of it, like Mr. Watts, in their lives as in their words and works. These are the Galahads and Percivals, of whom one of themselves1 has said: "The prophets and guides of humanity upon its pilgrimage are the men on whose brow God has set the seal of Genius sanctified by Virtue." L. E. MARTINEAU. 1 Joseph Mazzini. A NEW ASPECT OF DARWINISM. A DISTINGUISHED doctor said to me not long ago that the best mark of an able man in his profession was that he knew how little of medical science was certain, and realised that nine-tenths of it was empirical. Such a man was the likeliest to effect a cure and the likeliest to extend the bounds of science. The common duffers supposed there was little unknown, and seldom studied any case further than to see what rule to apply. This is an old story, as old as human history, and may be paralleled in any profession. What is worse, it is conspicuous in science. It might be less so if precision in the use of our language were more esteemed, for that would mean precision in thought too. The popular contrast between words and facts misleads us into supposing that words do not matter. It is the delusion of savages. Words are our principal means of knowing facts not under our noses. The contrast that is important is between words that are and words that are not rightly fitted to facts. It is another popular delusion-natural in a nation of newspaperreaders that there are no words of abiding truth. The public like Pilate asks in jest, "What is truth?" and grins at you sincerely enough. Its attitude even to our best writers is not unlike that of the listening loungers to the stump orators in the parks. The truth is not wanted and not expected, only something to amuse. Literary men" need to spin yarns, which nobody is expected to believe. So averse are we to facing the facts of life that we jumble up what we cannot help knowing into a few crude guesses and go dreaming along. When jostled awake for a minute, we just stumble in the opposite direction, so that the collective progress of the human intellect may fairly be compared to that of a drunk man staggering home, swerving from one side of the road to the other. men. Take a sample of this. The hills and the rocks seem to us everlasting. Lasting indeed they are, compared to the little lives of Then comes to the common-place man the discovery that in long millions of years the rocks and the hills do change, or perhaps he sees or hears of an earthquake. Dropping the delusion that they are everlasting, he falls into another, that they are more changeable than himself; and even the judicious Professor Geikie (in his "Earth Sculpture") quotes with approval the lines of Tennyson: The hills are shadows, and they flow Let us complete the quotation: They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. Compare this with the original Latin poetry which suggested the hyperbole, namely, the lines of Ovid: "I have seen the sea where once was most solid ground; and lands made from the ocean have I seen; while far from the shore the sea-shells were strewn." Even a scientific writer would now think this too cold. It is perfectly true, that is all; and, as science cannot be advanced by counting votes, the sooner we learn the value of accurate statement, the better it will be for science, if not for ourselves. In no province is this more needful than in biology, the science of the phenomena of life. In 1880 Huxley prophesied that in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin of Species with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. "It is," he remarked, "the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. None can blame Huxley for this prophecy's fulfilment, which he deplored in advance. Far be it from me to say a word in depreciation of one of the best men that lived in the nineteenth century. What though he did seem to think, at times, that he could discover the secrets of the Universe from the corpses of the beasts? He was too big a man to go on thinking so. He had flung himself too heartily into his business, that was all; and his mind was subdued to what it worked in, "like the dyer's hand." The pleasure of reading his books is like that of watching an expert engineer at a difficult task. No prize-fight could be more exhilarating than the controversy between him and Mr. Gladstone. Courage, intellect and industry like Huxley's are so rare that, to see them, it is well worth while to be bored a little about bones. For many generations in Europe men had believed that the various species of living things were fixed and unalterable. Gradually it came to light that in the course of ages one species had evolved out of another, type succeeding type. No more beautiful bird's-eye view of the world's history was ever unfolded before men's eyes, if only they could have had the patience to state it clearly and look at it. But that has been exactly what they did not do. They rushed to the opposite extreme, and concluded that all species were in a fluid state, like the cloud to which Hamlet invited the attention of Polonious; and in all seriousness, with quite unconscious humour, many scientific sages, fresh from the laboratory or the dissectingroom, with only a superficial knowledge of human history, have humoured us to the top of our bent. It is poor consolation indeed to feel they are sincere enough. That only means they are themselves no wiser than those who heed them. What has never yet been remarked is that this is merely the revival of a foolish old superstition, still believed by many Asiatics. When once an intelligent globe-trotter asked me what the effect of the "discovery" of Natural Selection would be upon the Buddhist faith, I showed him Buddhists as confident as himself of the instability of species. A certain regimental doctor once spoke of sacrificing himself to science by marrying an ape. His messmates hinted at a strait-waistcoat. He was more easily dissuaded when he learned that the natives would see nothing to wonder at but his bad taste! The gradations in European thought from sense to nonsense are as many as the links between different kinds of animals; but they are much less amusing to behold. Suffice it to glance at the extremities. Darwin himself distinguished between evolution-which the facts ef geology alone almost suffice to prove—and his theory of Natural Selection, which he tendered as an explanation of it, a working hypothesis, nothing more. He insisted that it was not the exclusive means of modifying species. Variation which could not be accounted for he always recognised, and at last he plainly said that he had under-estimated the amount of it. Far different is the procedure now of some so-called scientists, to whom Natural Selection has become a superstition. Huxley was a true prophet, and the fanatics in science bid fair to become as much of a nuisance as ever were the priests. To suppose that evidence of evolution proved Natural Selection was only their first step. The next was to suppose that the evolution of human society could be understood by studying the fishes in the sea and other creatures even less intelligent. In an outburst of wild humour, Carlyle makes Teufelsdroeckh compare the inhabitants of a city to "an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others." In sad literal earnest, poor Nietsche considered society to be something even more hideous, a mass of savage beasts of prey. A fishpond, void of food, and full of fishes, with nothing to live upon but each othersuch was the appearance of Humanity to the unhappy Nietsche. No wonder he ended early in a madhouse! Dean Swift seemed to be going far when he humorously described a political projector at Lagado, whose pet scheme was to provide |