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parison between the different races in respect of their sacredness,' which it happily is not, the least sacred of all would be that which had most persistently refused to come into the allegiance of humanity.

One more remark is suggested by the discussion of the Jewish question, and perhaps it is the most important of all. It is surely time for the rulers of Christian Churches in general, and for those of the Established Church in particular, to consider whether the sacred books of the Hebrews ought any longer to be presented as they are now to Christian people as pictures of the Divine character and of the Divine dealings with mankind. Historical philosophy reads them with a discriminating eye. It severs the tribal and the primæval from the universal, that which is perennially moral, such as most of the commandments in the Decalogue, from that which by the progress of humanity has ceased to be so. It marks, in the midst of that which is utterly unspiritual and belongs merely to primitive society or to the Semite of Palestine, the faint dawn of the spiritual, and traces its growing brightness through the writings of prophets and psalmists till it becomes day. But the people are not historical philosophers. Either they will be misled by the uncritical reading of the Old Testament or they will be repelled. Hitherto they have been misled, and some of the darkest pages of Christian history, including those which record the maltreatment of Jews in so far as it was religious, have been the result of their aberrations. Now they are being repelled, and the repulsion is growing stronger and more visible every day. It is not necessary, and it might be irritating, to rehearse the long series of equivocal passages which shocked the moral sense of Bishop Colenso, and of which Mr. Ingersoll, the great apostle of Agnosticism in America, makes use in his popular lectures with terrible effect. The question is one of the most practical kind, and it will not well brook delay. It is incomparably more urgent than that of Biblical revision.

I cannot conclude without repeating that if this was a case of opposition to religious liberty, I should thoroughly share the emotions. and heartily echo the words of Mr. Lucien Wolf. But I have convinced myself and I think Mr. Wolf's own paper when carefully examined affords proof-that it is a case of a different kind.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

FICTION-FAIR AND FOUL.

V. THE TWO SERVANTS.

I HAVE assumed throughout these papers, that everybody knew what Fiction meant; as Mr. Mill assumed in his Political Economy, that everybody knew what wealth meant. The assumption was convenient to Mr. Mill, and persisted in: but, for my own part, I am not in the habit of talking, even so long as I have done in this instance, without making sure that the reader knows what I am talking about; and it is high time that we should be agreed upon the primary notion of what a Fiction is.

A feigned, fictitious, artificial, super-natural, put-together-out-ofone's-head, thing. All this it must be, to begin with. The best type of it being the most practically fictile-a Greek vase. A thing which has two sides to be seen, two handles to be carried by, and a bottom to stand on, and a top to be poured out of, this, every right fiction is, whatever else it may be. Planned rigorously, rounded smoothly, balanced symmetrically, handled handily, lipped softly for pouring out oil and wine. Painted daintily at last with images of eternal things

For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair.

Quite a different thing from a 'cast',-this work of clay in the hands of the potter, as it seemed good to the potter to make it. Very interesting, a cast from life may perhaps be; more interesting, to some people perhaps, a cast from death;-most modern novels are like specimens from Lyme Regis, impressions of skeletons in mud.

'Planned rigorously '-I press the conditions again one by one-it must be, as ever Memphian labyrinth or Norman fortress. Intricacy full of delicate surprise; covered way in secrecy of accurate purposes, not a stone useless, nor a word nor an incident thrown away.

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Rounded smoothly '-the wheel of Fortune revolving with it in unfelt swiftness; like the world, its story rising like the dawn, closing like the sunset, with its own sweet light for every hour.

'Balanced symmetrically '-having its two sides clearly separate, its war of good and evil rightly divided. Its figures moving in majestic law of light and shade.

Handled handily so that, being careful and gentle, you can

take easy grasp of it and all that it contains; a thing given into your hand thenceforth to have and to hold. Comprehensible, not a mass that both your arms cannot get round; tenable, not a confused pebble heap of which you can only lift one pebble at a time.

'Lipped softly-full of kindness and comfort: the Keats line indeed the perpetual message of it- For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair.' All beautiful fiction is of the Madonna, whether the Virgin of Athens or of Judah-Pan-Athenaic always.

And all foul fiction is leze majesté to the Madonna and to womanhood. For indeed the great fiction of every human life is the shaping of its Love, with due prudence, due imagination, due persistence and perfection from the beginning of its story to the end; for every human soul, its Palladium. And it follows that all right imaginative work is beautiful, which is a practical and brief law concerning it. All frightful things are either foolish, or sick, visits of frenzy, or pollutions of plague.

Taking thus the Greek vase at its best time, for the symbol of fair fiction: of foul, you may find in the great entrance-room of the Louvre, filled with the luxurious orfèvrerie of the sixteenth century, types perfect and innumerable: Satyrs carved in serpentine, Gorgons platted in gold, Furies with eyes of ruby, Scyllas with scales of pearl; infinitely worthless toil, infinitely witless wickedness; pleasure satiated into idiocy, passion provoked into madness, no object of thought, or sight, or fancy, but horror, mutilation, distortion, corruption, agony of war, insolence of disgrace, and misery of Death.

It is true that the ease with which a serpent, or something that will be understood for one, can be chased or wrought in metal; and the small workmanly skill required to image a satyr's hoof and horns, as compared to that needed for a human foot or forehead, have greatly influenced the choice of subject by incompetent smiths; and in like manner, the prevalence of such vicious or ugly story in the mass of modern literature is not so much a sign of the lasciviousness of the age, as of its stupidity, though each react on the other, and the vapour of the sulphurous pool becomes at last so diffused in the atmosphere of our cities, that whom it cannot corrupt, it will at least stultify.

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Yesterday, the last of August, came to me from the Fine Art Society, a series of twenty black and white scrabbles of which I am informed in an eloquent preface that the author was a Michael Angelo of the glebe, and that his shepherds and his herdswomen are akin in dignity and grandeur to the prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine.

Glancing through the series of these stupendous productions, I 'Jean François Millet. Twenty Etchings and Woodcuts reproduced in Facsimile, and Biographical Notice by William Ernest Henley. London, 1881.

find one peculiarly characteristic and expressive of modern picturemaking and novel-writing,--called 'Hauling' or more definitely 'Paysan rentrant du Fumier,' which represents a man's back, or at least the back of his waistcoat and trowsers, and hat, in full light, and a small blot where his face should be, with a small scratch where its nose should be, elongated into one representing a chink of timber in the background.

Examining the volume farther, in the hope of discovering some trace of reasonable motive for the publication of these works by the Society, I perceive that this Michael Angelo of the glebe had indeed natural faculty of no mean order in him, and that the woful history of his life contains very curious lessons respecting the modern conditions of Imagination and Art.

I find in the first place, that he was a Breton peasant; his grandmother's godson, baptized in good hope, and

christened Jean, after his father, and François after the Saint of Assisi, his godmother's patron. It was under her care and guidance and those of his uncle, the Abbé Charles, that he was reared; and the dignified and laborious earnestness of these governors of his was a chief influence in his life, and a distinguishing feature in his character. The Millet family led an existence almost patriarchal in its unalterable simplicity and diligence; and the boy grew up in an environment of toil, sincerity and devoutness. He was fostered upon the Bible, and the great book of nature. . . . When he woke, it was to the lowing of cattle and the song of birds; he was at play all day, among the sights and sounds of the open landscape'; and he slept with the murmur of the spinning-wheel in his ears, and the memory of the evening prayer in his heart. . . . He learned Latin from the parish priest, and from his uncle Charles; and he soon came to be a student of Virgil, and while yet young in his teens began to follow his father out into the fields, and thenceforward, as became the eldest boy in a large family, worked hard at grafting and ploughing, sowing and reaping, scything and shearing and planting, and all the many duties of husbandmen. Meanwhile, he had taken to drawing, . . . copied everything he saw, and produced not only studies but compositions also; until at last his father was moved to take him away from farming, and have him taught painting.

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Now all this is related concerning the lad's early life by the prefatory and commenting author, as if expecting the general reader to admit that there had been some advantage for him in this manner of education that simplicity and devoutness are wholesome states of mind; that parish curés and uncle Abbés are not betrayers or devourers of youthful innocence-that there is profitable reading in the Bible-and something agreeably soothing-if no otherwise useful, in the sound of evening prayer. I may observe also in passing, that his education, thus far, is precisely what for the last ten years, I have been describing as the most desirable for all persons intending to lead an honest and Christian life: (my recommendation that peasants should learn Latin having been, some four or five years ago, the subject of much merriment in the pages of Judy and other such nurses

of divine wisdom in the public mind.) It however having been determined by the boy's father that he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbé Charles and the village Curé (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible Pope did but know it, he and his now artless shepherds stand at a fatal disadvantage in the world, as compared with monks who could illuminate with colour as well as word)-the simple young soul is sent for the exalting and finishing of its artistic faculties to Paris.

'Wherein,' observes my prefatory author, the romantic movement was in the full tide of prosperity.'

Hugo had written Notre Dame,' and Musset had published 'Rolla' and the Nuits;' Balzac the Lys dans la Vallée;' Gautier the 'Comédie de la Mort;' Georges Sand Léone Léonie;' and a score of wild and eloquent novels more; and under the instruction of these romantic authors, his landlady, to whom he had entrusted the few francs he possessed, to dole out to him as he needed, fell in love with him, and finding he could not, or would not, respond to her advances, confiscated the whole deposit, and left him penniless. The preface goes on to tell us how, not feeling himself in harmony with these forms of Romanticism, he takes to the study of the Infinite, and Michael Angelo; how he learned to paint the Heroic Nude; how he mixed up for imitation the manners of Rubens, Ribera, Mantegna, and Correggio; how he struggled all his life with neglect, and endured with his family every agony of poverty; owed his butcher and his grocer, was exposed to endless worry and annoyance from writs and executions; and when first his grandmother died, and then his mother, for neither deathbed was able to raise the money that would have carried him from Barbizon to Gruchy.

The work now laid before the public by the Fine Art Society is to be considered, therefore-whatever its merits or defects may be-as an expression of the influence of the Infinite and Michael Angelo on a mind innocently prepared for their reception. And in another place I may take occasion to point out the peculiar adaptability of modern etching to the expression of the Infinite, by the multitude of scratches it can put on a surface without representing anything in particular; and to illustration of the majesty of Michael Angelo by preference of the backs and legs of people to their faces.

But I refer to the book in this paper, partly indeed because my mind is full of its sorrow, and I may not be able to find another opportunity of saying so; but chiefly, because the author of the preface has summed the principal authors of depraved Fiction in a single sentence; and I want the reader to ask himself why, among all the forms of the picturesque which were suggested by this body of literary leaders, none were acceptable by, none helpful to, the mind of a youth trained in purity and faith.

He will find, if he reflect, that it is not in romantic, or any