partakes of the supersensuous or unknown shall have something superior to the known to give it character. And though that may be wholly unscientific to the investigator it touches a fundamental faith of humanity which is after all more value to the race than aught that science has yet unfolded, and that is a belief in the ideal beauty, truth and perfection which sleep in the unseen and which any true vision of it must reveal to man. It is this that has made the jealous exactions upon art in all directions. Standing as a seer upon the mountain tops of vision, the artist is expected to disclose to man something beyond the dull level of his common life, and if he can not do it his vision is discredited. Says life to art, I love thee best, Not when I find in thee My very face and form expressed But when in thee my yearning eyes The mystery of my memories And all I long to be. That is the true demand upon art everywhere, and all the waves of realism that have been brought to bear upon it can not obscure it. Indeed, it is the eternal protest of the soul that the ideal is the real. It is also the admission of the soul that it is walking now in rather a vain show, considering that so little of the ideal is disclosed about it. Neither is it any use to look for the ideal along the ordinary lines of man's investigation. With all respect to the gifted writer who found the climax that satisfied her etched above the head of a Sunday speaker, the ideals of truth and beauty are not always found in halos about the head of pious preachers or even positivist philosophers, but come up oft times clearest from the pit where some delirious Poe, De Quincy or Villon fights back the murky cohorts of the night and lets the startled daylight in. The main consolation in the case is the certainty that the glorious ideal is always existent back of all phenomena, and waiting ever to break through the evil of the so-called actual, much as Carlyle expresses it when he exclaims, "Oh, thou who pinest in the imprisonment of the actual and criest to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing (the ideal) thou seekest is already with thee, could'st thou only see." The prayer of Ajax for the light is, therefore, the main one that the wrestler with either life or art has need of, and back of that the deathless faith to believe that the children of the light are there, though his vision or his craft should never reach them. This is, of course, the life principle of all achievements, of all endeavor, and it is not strange that in the pursuit of it the feverish artist should hearken at every door of the occult, the mystic, to see if some chink through the darkness will not let in the sound or glimpse of the eternal. It is only when he ceases to hearken or cries back to the waiting multitudes that the ideal is a dream that his work is deadnay, more, that he is dead also. For it is much with life as the poet writes of friendship: I am not shocked by failings in my friend, Contentment on the lower plane, acceptance of the imperfect shadow for the perfect reality, is the one sin for which the spirits of light and progress know no redemption. Fortunately, it is not a common one to restless humanity. Though countless charmers on every hand offer it the shadow for the substance, and all the pleasures of the phantom show, the hunger "pain of finite hearts that yearn" for the infinite real is preferred before them. Art, romance, the poet's dream and the prophet's vision, all, all are tried and tested by this inner longing, and if they fall short of the demands, the scoffs and jests of disappointed spirits ring round them and the dusts of time receive them. Bad dreams may indeed bring bloody hands and daggers for the artists' use, but after all he who sees to the end of dreams alone can fit them to the eternal issues and leave the moral order of the universe uncaricatured by them. It is dangerous for an author to put much trust in a vision till he has tried the vision to see if it be of the gods. That these gods are in better business than untangling the knots of sensational novels is the thing commonly predicted of them. But, after all, that may be only another of the pious frauds perpetrated upon us by those who claim a closer acquaintance with them than the exhibition of it warrants. That no one can quite declare where, in all the seething mass of mind or intellect their swift lightning may strike, is the first lesson of capricious genius and mental power. With such great moral teachers as Hugo, Hawthorne, Dickens, before our eyes no one can well deny it to the novelist. All that we can fairly ask of them in dealing with the higher powers and visions is that they shall observe something of the harmonies of the old Greek dramatists who made it a rule never to let a god appear unless for actions worthy of a god. A LAWS AND LAWMAKERS PROMINENT club woman of Chicago once found herself in an embarrassing situation. With a view to reforming things in the educational affairs of the city she called upon the president of the board of education to say that her club demanded the enactment of a particular rule. Being induced to put that rule in writing she was shown by the papers of the board that the identical regulation required had not only been in existence, but in actual operation, for some twelve or fourteen years. This was trying, of course, to an "estimable and intelligent" leader of clubs and reforms and it is to be feared that the amused president rather pressed his advantage when he requested her to give the matter away more effectually by circulating copies of the embarrassing rule among the members of her club. Yet this she might have accomplished with a laugh, although it is said she declined the opportunity of turning the neat joke into club sport and left the triumphant president to serve it up for his own purposes in an Eastern paper. However, a board of education president ought not to be too sarcastic over it, for it is not a dull woman that could draw up on a moment's notice a fundamental rule for the right management of schools, and that she was disturbing the air with demands for a law that already existed is no more than all teachers, preachers, agitators, reformers and lawmakers the world over are more or less engaged in. There is not a legislator who ever formulated a law worth considering that he was not simply repeating a rule of life already in existence. Indeed, the beauty of life is that there is a definite rule or law for securing to us every joy or good our souls can pine for, and the only concern we have in the matter is not to cross those laws. Yet consider the army of enterprising Solons, who go about laying down rules for everything and laws to regulate the universe, while only now and then some honest Philistine will tell us frankly that we need none of them, and that "the ideal of life is only man's normal life." It is a law of being that we should be perfect, that we should be fair, that we should be happy, that the things we want should come to us, the friends we seek seek us, and the love we need need us. Yet from all time people quite outside the secrets of our individual lives and needs have been industriously telling us "how to be happy," "how to be good," "how to be beautiful,” “how to be beloved." In fact, the inmost sanctities of our souls have been resolved into codes and treaties till half the sweetness and the flavor have been taken out of them. What finer, subtler thing exists in life than a perfect human friendship? Yet consider the cold-blooded analysis and rule-making to which it has been subjected by different writers from Plato down, till it has actually come to pass that we read and find approved such counsel as this: "Friendship is to be valued for what there is in it, and not for what can be gotten out of it. When two people appreciate each other because each has found the other convenient to have around, they are not friends." What is a woman's naïve tampering with an existent school law by the side of that? And love! that more than earthly mystery and miracle of all being! What has been done by the lawmakers with its "free primeval spirit of holiness and light." To such tape measure rules of life and liberty, such desecrating ideas of right and wrong, has it |