that which lies deeper than expression—the creative faculty, the ineffable gift of genius, the capacity—define or describe how you will, by which comes that intuitive insight into the life of nature and man, that strange susceptibility to what is noble and tender and beautiful which touches and thrills us in the works of the great masters of art and song. Now this is an element which cannot be transmitted or handed down. It is independent of tradition and education; it comes as an inspiration on elected souls fresh from the eternal fount of light, and the men of later times have no nearer or freer access to it than those of ages the most remote. As the world grows older and the Arts can look back on a longer history, it becomes indeed easier for minds of average ability by dint of culture to get up the external accessories of Art, to mimic the voice, the tone, the manner, the forms of expression, which, once peculiar to genius, are now the stock conventions of the poet's or painter's craft. By laborious study of models and of varieties of style and treatment, the clever art-aspirant may gain a specious facility of execution, and so qualify himself to produce manufactured articles that impose on the unpractised, and pass with many for the genuine fruit of inspiration; or he may so steep himself in the atmosphere of some great master as to catch the trick of his manner, and produce on undiscerning minds an impression in some faint measure akin to his. It is one result again of the varied literary culture of our time to render it easier for talent and cleverness to write well, to write with a seeming flow of ideas and facility of language which at an earlier time would have been to the mass of clever bookmakers an altogether impossible achievement. The stage properties of literary art have gone on accumulating for many ages, and are now accessible to all. Not only the machinery of versification, the knack of an ingenious and pleasing arrangement of melodious syllables, but a vast repertory of poetical effects, choice words, happy epithets, graceful images, metaphors, similes from every realm of nature, has so accumulated, that a competent literary artisan, endowed with a retentive memory, a cultivated taste, and a light and facile touch, may easily throw off lyrics, sonnets, epics, dramas, by the dozen—electrotype productions so closely resembling the real metal that very many purchasers never know the difference. But how little this increased facility of production is any sign of real progress in Art is made evident by the fact that, though a great poet or painter may, as in well-known instances, have a most perfect mastery of the medium of expression, yet the soul of Art may shine through the rudest and most imperfect forms, and that with an ineffable force and fervour which at once eclipses the borrowed light of laborious culture. A few rude scratches from the pencil of genius, a note or two struck from the lyre by a hand all innocent of artificial culture but in sympathy with the soul of nature and vibrating in response to 'the still sad music of humanity,' may be instinct with a power and pathos, a capacity to charm and elevate and delight, which are the irrefragable tokens of a true inspiration.
From the same cause it follows that great works of art do not, like the works of many great scientific writers, become in course of time antiquated and obsolete. If Science possesses a character of progressiveness which Art cannot claim, those who labour in the realm of Art have this compensation, that here the results of individual effort have a permanence which is impossible in Science. A great work of art has a value which is all its own, which is independent of any step it marks in the progress of Art, and which therefore it never loses. So long as the material form lasts men do not cease to admire and cherish it, and even in the most distant ages, amidst a thousand changes in the thought and life of the world, it remains, in and for itself, a cherished possession of mankind. Not less now than when the chisel of the Athenian sculptor gave the last touch to the Theseus of the Parthenon, or the groups of citizens gazed for the first time on the glorious procession of festive forms, moving, leaping, dancing amidst garlands and song, to which the hand of genius had given immortal expression in the frieze that swept round the great temple of the Acropolis—with not less admiration in this far distant age, torn away though they be from their place and little more than defaced fragments of the great originals, do thousands from all lands gaze on these monuments of ancient genius preserved for us in the great English repository of Art. And so, too, are not this and other schools of learning in this country bearing daily their silent testimony to the undying interest which the world retains in whatever survives to us of the treasures of ancient literature? Time has not antiquated the great classical writers of antiquity, nor the progress of knowledge rendered their thoughts obsolete. Their ideas have indeed been assimilated by the minds and absorbed into the language and literature of succeeding ages, but not less do their works themselves, in their original form and shape, remain the subjects of our study and admiration. Our best intellects teach and comment on them. Our most skilled critics spend their lives in eliciting and setting in fresh light their beauty of thought and exquisite perfection of form. We are not satisfied
