I

It belongs with the confusion of esthetics in our time that the same people who ask art to be original often ask it to be natural. Being natural would appear at first sight the least original of programmes. Even if by originality we mean personality, yet there still seems some contradiction in the wish at one and the same time to develop a strong personality and to remain in a state of nature. Since it is the thoroughbred, not the wild animal, that is distinguished from his fellows, and the cultivated bloom, not the field flower, that charms by its single self rather than in quantity, a condition of impulse close to the unsifted accidents of life would seem to promise an art notable chiefly for its volume, its indistinction and its insignificance. But those who ask art to be natural never mean completely natural. In their wiser moments they are only asking art not to be artificial, or at least to help them forget it is artificial. They demand a “realistic and romantic naturalism”, or “a world of honest, and often harsh reality”, and what they are looking for is indicated by the fact that they find something convincingly lifelike in a drama of low life or an American vulgarization of a French farce, but something strained and mechanical in a comedy by Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Art, no doubt, is still desirable in literature—art shot through with crude material, to reassure us that we are human. Since all plays are highly artificial, naturalness is hardly the word for the virtue of good plays; they are convincing, rather, they take us frankly into another world, and for the moment make us forget it is not our world of everyday. Yet those who ask the stage to be natural are apparently reassured when through the imaginary world of art breaks some accent of ordinary speech, some aspect of our common sordidness. Here, it seems, we touch earth and are strengthened.

The cult of the natural at its best asks of the medium of art also, as well as of the subject, that it wear a common aspect, untouched by artifice. Many of the new poets take as their ideal “the sequence of the spoken phrase”, with a special dislike of all “inversions”; the “language of common speech” will serve their purposes. Yet most of them are better poets than their theories would indicate, and their practise, like Wordsworth’s in a similar predicament, is perhaps sufficient guide to the kind of naturalness they are after. An Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg is the kind of naturalness Wordsworth fell into when he was off his guard. “Other poets”, says a more modern cultivator of naturalism, “will come and perchance perfect where these men have given the tools. Other writers, forgetting the stormy times in which this movement had its birth, will inherit in plenitude and calm that for which they have fought.” Most of us who are convinced that all speech is artful in so far as it is intelligible, can occasionally put up with a bit of fine writing like this, but we note in passing that “perchance” and “plenitude” are not the language of common speech today. As for the fear of inversions and the sacredness of the natural word-order, it is enough for the moment to observe that no one order is natural for all peoples, nor for any one speech at all times; different word-orders express different states of emotion, even different ideas, and one is as natural as the other. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” or “Tell not me in mournful numbers”—which is the natural order? From another and contemporary New England poet, who sticks valiantly for the natural sequence of speech, we may examine a characteristic line, which has as high a percentage of nature in it as absence of art can insure—“I must pass that door to go to bed.” Would it be less natural to say, “To go to bed, I must pass that door”?

To practise artifice and yet to seem spontaneous, to be natural and yet to achieve art—these ancient paradoxes against which the cultivators of the natural arrive, in both the subject-matter and the medium of literature, need to be examined in greater detail, but it is well to observe them first in a general way, in order to mark how much confusion lies on the very surface of such thinking. It is emotion perhaps rather than thinking; it is a protest in another form against what seems old and inherited; it is an impatience with art itself. Yet art exerts its old charm upon us all, and the worshipper of the natural succumbs unawares to every triumph over nature. In American letters we fix on Abraham Lincoln as our type of natural expression; the legend of his humble beginnings and the plainness of his manner deceive us into a conviction that he was less indebted to art than Thomas Jefferson, and we therefore talk of the rhetorical extravagances of the Declaration and contrast them with the Attic simplicities of the Gettysburg Address. Perhaps we see a final proof of our sound taste in the story that Matthew Arnold gave up the Address for lost when he got to the colloquial “proposition”; “dedicated to the proposition”, we say, was more than his artificial spirit could bear. Whether Arnold expressed such an opinion, or whether he would have been right in so doing, is of less consequence than our emotional readiness, if we cultivate the natural, to accept the Lincoln speech as an illustration of our ideal, and to set it over against the artifice of Jefferson’s great document—to detect a literary manner in such a phrase as “When in the course of human events”, and nothing but naturalness in “Fourscore and seven years ago”—or to find an empty and sounding rhetoric in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, but only the democratic syllables of common sense in “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Both documents are as rich as they can well be in rhetoric, as all great oratory is, and of the two, Lincoln’s as a matter of fact is rather more artful in the progress of its ideas.

II

Our confusion in the search for the natural in art springs from the many different meanings that attach to both words, art and nature. For most of us, perhaps, art is a decoration, something supplementary to life; in the spirit of this definition we understand what it is to cultivate the arts—to buy pictures when our means will permit us that addition to more primary interests, or to attend the opera after the preliminary stages of our social pilgrimage. We use the word art so often in this bad sense, with the implication of insincerity, that there is something bracing in any invitation to return to nature and to be once more what we were while we still were honest with ourselves and had a sense of humor.

This nature that we return to, haunts our thoughts as a fixed state in which the wise soul can find enduring refuge. Just how we get the idea that nature is stable, is not easy to see; the notion often exists in our minds side by side with a deep conviction that life is a flux, and that time and space are but relative terms in the universal stream. But perhaps it is the outer appearance of the world, nature as landscape, that first suggests a refuge even against time, mountains are so immovable in their mysterious silence for us as for Wordsworth, the ocean is so untamable for us, as it was for Byron. Perhaps also the contemplation of the changing universe during the past century of daring and imaginative science has endowed nature with a romantic career of its own, such as the old humanists ascribed only to men; perhaps the progress of stars, planets and solar systems, observed or guessed at, suggests in spite of the evolution it illustrates a deeper kind of rest in the laws by which that evolution conducts itself; so that the last result of turning from human art to watch the behavior of inanimate things is the conviction that nothing is really inanimate, but that all move in the wisdom of an art superhuman, in an order peaceful and eternal as only a divine vitality could conceive. When we think of nature in this sense of the word, leaving man out of the picture, ourselves too as far as possible who do the thinking, we are ready to say with Emerson that art is an impertinent intrusion, nature is all. “Nature in the common sense refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf; art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture; but his operations taken together are so insignificant,—a little shaping, baking, patching and washing,—that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind they do not vary the result.”

We can speak of nature in this all-embracing way so long as, like Emerson for the moment, we lay aside every thought of man and of the moral world which he creates or brings under his control, and in which his responsibility is fixed. But once we resume that human outlook, we begin to use the word natural in at least two other senses. In the first place we use it to describe the process of life, that constant birth or becoming which seems to have been present to the mind of the Greek also when he used his word for nature—as when Aristotle says, in a famous phrase, that art is an imitation of nature, meaning that the process of art is a copy of the processes of birth and becoming, and creates by the same methods that life does. In this sense of the word nature is like art, not opposed to it, and with this interpretation Polixenes tried to rebuke the cult of the natural in Perdita, who would not have in her garden a flower artificially bred:

We use the word nature also to describe the raw material of life which is the result of a previous birth or becoming. It is what some earlier art, human or divine, has already worked on, and what we must work on now if art is to continue. Nature in this sense is the marble, the color, the language which are to be the mediums of various arts; human passions and instincts also, the social and the material environments which attend our lives, the accidents of fortune which make up their plots; and since all this is what art must work upon, nature so defined is forever somewhat opposed to art, as inanimate materials are opposed to the workman, as the wood and the chisel are opposed to the carpenter. For art is the use of the materials of life for human benefit, a method employed for a premeditated end in a world which except for art might seem given over to chance. Because it is a rearrangement and a control of nature to effect the will of man, life itself, so far as it becomes civilized, becomes an art. But in a world as old as ours the raw material with which art deals is itself the result of art; the wood has been already shaped into boards, the chisel and the hammer have been made into tools before the carpenter touches them, and the environment in which the carpenter is born, the instincts and passions he inherits, the turns and coincidences of his fate, are all probably the result of what others before him made of their materials and opportunities. Thinking of life so, we see it as an alternation of nature and art, or as an alternation in which what first is art becomes afterwards nature, all the achievement of one generation turning into mere starting point and opportunity for the next; and thinking of life so, we understand how nature, to the true artist, is forever set over against art in a contrast that implies affection rather than antagonism, for those who instead of defining art as a decorative supplement to life identify it with civilization itself, are free to love nature without abandoning an ideal, as a sculptor is free to love fine marble, or the painter to love his medium of tint and tone. With time and by such a process of reworking, nature draws nearer and nearer to art; the raw material is made constantly more orderly by rearrangement, as a field is enriched by plowing in the crops. Even in the sphere of human character this is true, in the very seat of the natural, in our instincts and passions; for though we may agree that character should be measured by a moral career rather than by impulses wholly innate, yet it is well to reflect that your impulses and sentiments, if you are born and brought up in Florence or Chartres, Heidelberg or Seville, are likely to be different from the impulses and sentiments natural to a child born or brought up in The Bronx or in Hoboken. In the eyes of the naturalist, nature is all, as Emerson said, and art only a little shaping, baking, patching and washing, but to the artist who carries in his imagination something of the scope of agelong growth and creation, the truth is what Nature said to the poet in Voltaire’s dialogue—“They call me nature, but by this time I am become all art.”

III

The possibility, then, of returning to nature disappears when we realize how long a road we have traveled; all that the most primitive minded of us can do is to stick close to the raw material of his own life, to the circumstances with which the art of his predecessors surrounded him. This is the nature which the realists cultivate today. They report those facts of life from which art might take its beginning, but they report them as much as possible in an arrested state, for fear they might pass on into art. Among the poets one, catching the accent of the spoken language, gives us the language of one phase of New England; another, with a like faithfulness to the natural cadence, gives us another kind of New England speech; a third has the colloquialism of Illinois. They are all artists, or they would not mean much to us, but in so far as they have followed their own ideals of the natural they have laid aside some of the magician’s robes to which by inheritance they are entitled, and they leave with us their renderings of our world in a form of utterance less noble than their theme and out of harmony with it. In our prose and verse alike, the studied inadequacy of style to the occasion is a standing reproach to us, all the worse since it is often the pose of an inverted vanity, like the democratic conviction still flourishing in the land that the dinner coat or the evening coat is an artifice of a worn-out society, whereas the senatorial frock coat and wide hat are natural and God-given sheathings of our original nakedness.

To revert to the starting point of our lives is to seek nature in vain, since the alternations of art and nature proceed relentlessly, whether we rest our dead weight on the process or try to help it along. It is a vain flattery of our reluctance to travel, to take our seat always in the last car. But, however futile, the cult of the natural in literature has a reasonable explanation, and it is well to understand with sympathy why it is likely to recur periodically in a civilization that must feel its age more and more. Art criticizes life, as we have often been told, by selecting or sifting it; that is what the word criticism means. The authority that art has over us, its right to make such a sifting, derives not from books but from the human brain itself, from the method of memory; we remember only by forgetting most of the things we have done or have suffered, and rearranging the rest. As we grow older life becomes clearer, we say, thanks to this selection and forgetting. When art sifts life, then, it is only imitating the process of nature, and when we observe the process we can understand why the Greeks said that memory was the mother of the muses. But this sifting of life on the part of memory and of art is progressive, and in all honesty we may wonder at times whether it has not gone too far. Some of the clarity of vision, the firmness of doctrine, which is the reward of old age, may be not the genuine harvesting of experience which is almost the gift of prophecy; it may be rather a partial memory which seems clear because so much has been left out. If a poet could get a first-hand impression of life, his art would be one sifting of nature; if he reacts not only to nature but to the interpretations of other poets, his art is a second sifting, more highly organized, perhaps, more intelligible, than is normally recorded from immediate contact with life. It makes no difference whether we call these siftings poetry or criticism, since poetry, as Arnold reminded us, is a criticism of life. The poet may submit his sensitiveness to nature as sifted through three or four or any number of interventions of personality, and we may call the result poetry, or criticism, or criticism of criticism; very often we cannot tell, and the poet does not know, whether the life that stimulates him is direct or transmitted. But in each remove from the first contact with nature, in each additional intervention of personality, we get a clearer order and a finer intelligibility—truth instead of facts, formulas instead of experiences, and fewer exceptions. The literature, then, which begins in naturalism will at last emerge in philosophy, if we allow it time enough, and the biography of an individual will be condensed and generalized into a proverb.

There are two good reasons, however, for suspecting this economical result. One is that the proverb is probably not true. To arrive at it, in each successive sifting we have left out something, and the total of all the omissions has become almost as comprehensive as the original experience. We must go back and gather up the discarded fragments of our adventure, in order to qualify properly our too simple and absolute summary of life. The art of the historian, we often fear, progresses by some such over-elimination; archÆology sometimes rescues him by restoring large sections of a past, the absence of which he had not noticed, but in periods too recent for archÆology to take him by surprise, he constantly rewrites his history, to sift it more to his mind, until we may suspect that his account is nearer to our philosophy than to the original facts. In history this tendency is hardly a matter of concern, for if we have a criticism of the eighteenth century which satisfies us, we are content, and the eighteenth century, being dead and gone, will not mind; the poet, therefore, can look on with equanimity while the historians propose to rewrite our national life in order to bring it more in harmony with our present sentiments toward this or that other country; the poet knows that history is not a science but one of the most fascinating of the arts, closely allied to eloquence in its mission to teach and persuade, and that having to do strictly with the past it enjoys rare freedom in sifting its facts. But the poet himself enjoys no such freedom. Whatever he writes will be checked up by the life we now live; his readers will look into their hearts and criticize. If therefore he has gained his clarity by leaving out things essential in our experience, we reject him as too far from our reality to be of consequence to the race. He may be a philosopher; he is no poet.

His philosophy may even be true, and yet his right to the laurel may be justly denied. For the special service of art is to make us live more intensely in the very life which art sifts and selects—in fact, the sifting has for its conscious purpose a more vivid realization of what we live through, and a novel or a play is successful, from the standpoint of imaginative literature, only in the degree to which we enter the work, become ourselves the hero, fall in love with the heroine, hate the villain. In this sense the dime novel and the melodrama, though carelessly branded by the theorist as bad art, are likely to be very good art indeed, and the over-reasoned story, though adorned with subtle reflection and refinements of diction, is in fact poor art, as the average person in his heart knows, for in such books the reflection upon life is paid for by a failure to represent what the reflection is about. If the author would only share with us the adventures that caused him to reflect, we could do our own reflecting upon them, but if he will not share the secret which inspires him, we do not care much what philosophizing he does. Literature continues to be great so long as the sifting it makes it really a selection only from life, and what remains is for the imagination still a first-hand experience; when the residue grows thin to the imagination and addresses itself rather to logic, we feel justified in making whatever return we can to our starting point in nature, to reassure ourselves there, if we cannot in the book, that this human life we love is still with us.

IV

If such a taking to cover is observed in much writing today, the writers who in one form or another now cultivate nature rather than art may plead with justice that the best literature our country produced before them was perilously deficient in a sense of reality. If they do so plead, however, they ought to be consistent. If they think that so great an artist as Hawthorne was deficient in reality, that transcendental philosophy occupies too much room in his romances and the sense of actual American life too little, then they ought not to tell us at the same time that Poe and Whitman are our great poets, for those two were even further along toward the abstract than Hawthorne. And there will be an increasing obligation on those who in each generation of the fast-ripening world make a return to nature, to provide some demonstration that it is not life after all they are running away from. Some men have taken to the hermit’s cell to find God; others to avoid responsibility. As civilization becomes greater in quantity, with more discoveries of science, with more apparatus of education, we need more and more the poetic genius that will dedicate this material to great ends, and by articulating for us what we can recognize as our best ideal, teach us to simplify life by casting off the other less significant interests. The solution of all this raw material for art can only be a greater art. When we turn back from this heroic opportunity to take refuge in what is for us nature, we must convince ourselves, if we can that our retreat does not indicate in us inadequate equipment or weak nerve or small heart.

In our present cult of the natural there is cause to suspect some such lack of skill and courage. The plea that our predecessors were so deficient in reality that we, to save the day, must exhibit less art than theirs, will not go in the long run. Our new poetry is curiously relaxed and enervated in temper, ground-hugging, grey and flat; if we have moods which such writing adequately represents, we have other moments more cheerful and creative, which our architecture and our engineering manage to express, but which cannot be guessed at in our poetry, not as much as the oak can be guessed at in the acorn. Our novels, too, have lost their courage, and though they often represent photographically the machine of civilization which builds up around us, and which now is the raw material on which our art is to operate, they do not even attempt to portray the spirit of the artist which actually pervades the land, the joy in putting the machine to human uses, the almost divine ecstasy in having made so much of nature subject already to the mind. This mood of confidence in art is as much a fact in our national life as the number of gallons that flow over Niagara each hour, but the poets and novelists seem to have taken fright.

In both verse and prose, in style as well as subject, the cult of the natural has limited our writers to a few individualistic attitudes, and has taken from them the power to speak with authority on all subjects for us all. We have no American poet, no American novelist; each is the poet or novelist of Vermont or Boston or Maine or Chicago—whatever scene is to him by birth or habit his natural world. To find a universal utterance of universal experience is the aim and the tendency of art, but the cult of nature compels us to return each in what state he came. The counsel to use the language of ordinary speech limits us to the speech of some locality; and such limitation is a fatal handicap for great poetry. The advice to use only the natural word-order limits us to the word-order which each of us finds natural, whereas it is our duty, on the contrary, if we make any claim to mastery in literature, to enlarge our vocabulary even beyond the words our family and our neighbors made natural to us, and to cultivate all the variety of word-order our speech permits, that we may enrich and refine our style, and render our meaning more precise. The temptation to get along with a small vocabulary and a meagre change of construction is altogether too natural; we did not need this premeditated urging to a still greater poverty. Hitherto the best remedy for a narrow equipment in language has been to read constantly in the great writers; it was they who extended the powers of speech and laid upon each tongue the shape and cadence which to the ill-informed might seem the gift of nature. But now that the ideal of the writer is to shrink to the measure of the conversation he is used to, how shall our nobler moments find expression? Not even in reading old authors, for by the contemporary doctrine of naturalness the old masters are artificial. “Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.” ... “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed there he fell down dead.” ... “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

These cadences are not natural, and they are not modeled on the sounds that habitually fill our ears. Their distinction, or if you like, their condemnation, is that they are works of art. Such language gets away as far as it can from time and place, and by much sifting out from unessentials it tries to preserve a universal appeal. If you can write this way at all, you can write as well in New York as in London, as well now as in 1611.

The purpose of art is to make its subject-matter also universal, to sift and rearrange the raw material of life into a history that will have as much meaning as possible for as many readers as possible, for as long as possible. But the cult of the natural tends to the opposite effect—to make the subject-matter of literature temporary in its interest and limited in its meaning. The Broadway entertainments which please us for the moment, since they conform to our taste in the spontaneous, the impromptu and the natural, are but the raw material of drama; good plays might be made out of them; but in each case the author stops the story before we pass from nature to art. It is natural, in the sense of our definition, that a stoker in modern times should have two ideas—that to the idle and effete he may seem akin to the missing link, and that since he is at the bottom of society, he must be supporting it. Quite a philosophy can be made out of two ideas, and these two, when put together, as in a recent drama, promise an explosion. But after all, nothing explodes. The man simply enunciates his two ideas in different accents of violence, until the author thinks it is time to stop, and gets him strangled in the zoo. An artist would have been interested to see in action a character with such a philosophy. We have recently seen another play with an idea, a very simple one; by any means in her power a girl is going to capture the man she loves. Since the only means in her power are eccentric ones, we watch her eccentricity with astonishment for three acts; her behavior is original, like nothing that ever was or will be, and our interest is held by the growing desperation of her ingenuity. Well, she gets him—for much the same reason that the philosophic stoker was strangled, because it is time for the audience to go home. An artist would have granted her ambition as natural, and her success as natural too; he would have shown us, however, what happened after her success, when her philosophy of opportunism in etiquette would have met its test. Had Much Ado About Nothing been written by the author of either of the plays just described, the famous comedy would never have got further than the raw material of the story, the legend that Benedick and Beatrice waged a merry war between them; we should have had an evening’s entertainment of jokes and insults, made gradually more intensive, more violent and more surprising in order to hold us till the last curtain. Shakespeare, choosing the way of art, begins rather at the point where the wit of Beatrice and Benedick is exhausted; they have the reputation for it, but their public efforts show signs of strain and flagging. From this start in nature the play proceeds to represent what happened to Benedick and Beatrice, the witty enemies, when serious accidents brought their fates together.

V

Nowhere in literature, perhaps, is art so obviously essential and naturalism so obviously fatal as in drama, for drama, by exhibiting life to us directly, quickens to its utmost whatever desire we have to see our fellows move on from their natural beginnings to some achievement or significant conclusion. Impulses, ideas, motives, prejudices, passions, and as we now say, complexes, are all natural forms of energy; in real life they weary us if they have only a lyric expression, and we wish they would get started into action. Their attempts toward action may be thwarted, and such a defeat may be tragically significant, but at least they should try, and if instead of trying they waste themselves in talk, they become not energies but nuisances. It is for this reason, we suppose, that Aristotle long ago cautioned us that tragedy, or all drama, is an imitation not of men but of an action, and that plot is the essential thing. He might have said that character may exist in a state of nature, but plot presupposes art in life, a selection from all other incidents of one succession of events which so selected have a meaning. What he did say was that without action there can be no drama, but there may be without character. Plot is a generalization of life, in which the actors may or may not be portrayed as individuals. The woman who lost the piece of silver, the good Samaritan, the mother of Œdipus, are clear enough in their universal relation to the story in which they appear; their personalities may be restated to suit our taste, or left undefined. We read in the newspaper that a man jumps into the river to save a drowning child, and having got to land, discovers that he has rescued his own son. We live in that drama without asking what was the character of the father or what was the psychology of the son.

It is remarkable how Shakespeare illustrates Aristotle’s doctrine, by showing his characters in action and by avoiding as far as possible an analysis of their motives, their instincts, their prejudices, their passions. Life with him finds expression in art or not at all. It is a mirror indeed which he applies to nature, not a microscope; in his glass we see the form of virtue and the features of vice, we know who are good and who are bad, at least as accurately as we form such judgments in life, but we do not know the motives of the good or the bad. What were Falstaff’s motives? Should he be acted as a comic or a tragic character? Why did Portia like Bassanio? Why did Cordelia take such an absolute stand with her father? What did Hero think of Claudio, or Hermione of Leontes, after the restoration to the jealous husband? Was Hamlet’s mother an accessory to the murder of his father, or did her conscience trouble her only because she had made a second marriage and in such haste? The profundity of Shakespeare’s art lies in his genius for representing the surface of action; in art as in ethics, life is chiefly conduct, and it is enough that behind conduct lies unprobed the same mystery that lies behind existence itself.

But since naturalism thinks otherwise, Shakespeare is no longer our example. Browning is more in our vein. For him the natural man, the raw material of each one of us, the hidden instincts and impulses, must be the whole subject, and action he finds useful only in the fragmentary incidents that must be premised before you can conclude anything even about instincts. Few verdicts in criticism are wider of the mark than the too familiar saying that Browning’s genius is Shakespearean. He is the opposite of Shakespeare. He is absorbed in what we call in a loose way psychology, in the original man apart from his conduct, or as far apart from it as you can separate him. To be so concerned about motives and instincts is to be a kind of inverted dramatist, moving back from action instead of toward it; it is no wonder, therefore, that Browning’s so-called dramas fail on the stage, since in that direct relation to the audience their static naturalness, their inability to live out a significance in conduct, is pitilessly revealed. Everybody examines himself and talks about himself, as God made him; nothing gets under way; the audience is finally delivered by the death of the soliloquizer, not in a zoo, but more politely, it may be, in a gondola. “Even if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character,” said Aristotle, “though well finished in diction and in thought, yet you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.” To return to nature absolutely would be to return to silence. Short of silence, to return to nature in literature is to confess your private character in monologue. Browning is master in that kind. It would be untactful to name the writers today who share the mastery with him, and perhaps it is enough merely to suggest the idea. To save time we might prudently meditate rather upon the few poets and novelists remaining whose art gets further than monologue.

Meanwhile the universe marches on its secret errand, not altogether secret since it marches, and its art is slowly dramatized in its vast conduct. Art for art’s sake is a formula inspiring if taken in a noble sense, but in any sense it is intelligible as a programme deliberately chosen. To cultivate nature for nature’s sake is absurd. For nature is here without our aid, and to preserve it in what we call its pure state, we need cultivate nothing—unless it be a more animal contentedness to profit in indolence by the art of those who came before us.