to wear them. There are very few like John Foster, to whom almost all art, especially all classical art, was essentially immoral because it nourished the pride of life art that appeals merely to curiosity or to the extreme sense of beauty is always thought safe and respectable; when we speak of immoral art we mean art that deals with sensual impulses, or rouses rebellion against the order of society; perhaps too there are many who object to the first because it results in the second. And even on this point public opinion is rather emphatic than clear. It would be hard to find a popular definition of literary immorality which would not condemn the episode of Paolo and Francesca; it is almost as if Dante had come to curse them, and lo! he blessed them altogether they are always together, and they always love; there are more who could learn to look to such a hell with yearning than choose to enter the purgatory of Gerontius. The Laureate may seem as unimpeachable on this score as Dante, yet it is hard not to think Aylmer's Field an immoral poem. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, and the only outcome of Aylmer's Field is the wrath of man. We have an evil action represented in an evil spirit; if we are not to condemn this, how are we to condemn such a poem as "The Leper, "à priori, merely because Mr. Swinburne follows Luther's maxim, pecca fortiter? In truth, the question within what limits it is safe to pursue" art for art," is hardly one that could be asked in an ideal state of things. Then art would be continually enriched by life, and life illuminated by art, It never occurred to Shakespeare, or Titian, or Leonardo, that the choice of Hercules lay between life and art art in its supreme epochs has always been nourished and exalted by the chastened or unchastened pride of life. When we speak of choosing art for art, we acknowledge that the pride of life does not need any longer to be mortified, because it is dead. When life and art are parted, "Stratus humi palmes viduas desiderat ulmos." But the gleaning of the vintage still is sweet; only when a man has renounced the rewards of life for art, he has not escaped its obligations; if any were mad enough to lose his soul for art, he would find he had lost art too. We cannot expect an ideal answer to a question which

it is a misfortune to have to ask. Artists who have not attained the vision of eternal and ideal beauty have no right to an ideal liberty, and we have no right to try their work by an ideal standard till we have tried ourselves. Every one must apply as he can the principle that all art is lawful for a man which can be produced or enjoyed within the limits of a safe and wholesome life. When we know that Etty lived quietly and soberly with his sister, and was grateful to her for finding him respectable models, we know that he had succeeded for himself in finding a true relation between morality and art. Yet we should think hardly of a man who collected exclusively what Etty produced exclusively. An idle man might get all the pleasure from Etty's pictures that they can give, and that is not a safe pleasure for an idle man, but the pictures themselves were the work of honest labor-and qui laborat orat. The safeguard that the artist has in the very necessity of working we may bring from our own work, and then we shall be most likely to find it anew in strenuous sympathy with his. To the pure all things are pure: it is recorded of one of the best public men of America that even the ballet always filled him with religious rapture.

It is fortunate to possess such a temper, it would be silly and dangerous to aim at it: individuals must be guided by their own desire for virtue, and by the consent of virtuous and cultivated men. It is suggestive to observe that the limits of their toleration vary according to the medium in which the artist works. In music there are hardly any limits at all; we can hardly imagine such a thing as a melody immoral in itself, though there are melodies which do not seem profaned when fitted to immoral words. Plastic art has less liberty, yet even here almost everything is permitted short of the direct instigation of the senses to rebellion; it is impossible to draw the line earlier when we have once sanctioned the representation of the nude. After all, Eye Gate does not lead far into the town of Mansoul. It is only when we come to the literature that the conflict becomes serious, and that honest artists wish to handle matters which honest men of the world wish to suppress. This points to a distinction which is not without practical value. Literature is the most complex form of art, the form which touches reality at most points, and therefore the

mind passes most easily from literature back to life. And therefore what is dangerous in life is dangerous in literature, though it may be innocent in other forms of art which in themselves are more intense. The first impression of a great picture or a great symphony is more vivid than the first impression of a great poem; it is at the same time more definite and more completely determined by the intention of the artist. A great picture, a great symphony are in one way infinitely complex, but both take their key-note from a single movement of the subject. Few subjects are too unsatisfactory to present at least one noble aspect, to strike at least one noble chord. In literature it is difficult to isolate the aesthetic side of a subject so completely, because literature tells by the result of a great many incomplete suggestions which the reader has to work out for himself, so that there is no security that he will be able to keep entirely within the intention of the writer. And the writer, too, finds it harder to subordinate the intellectual and the emotional sides of his subject to the aesthetical; and morality is certainly justified in proscribing anything that can make familiarity with those sides of an immoral subject less unwelcome and disgusting. Still it is possible to maintain a certain ideal abstractness of treatment even in literature which has its use. Every one feels the difference between the diseased insolent pruriency with which Byron keeps flaunting the sin in our faces in all the loves of Don Juan, and the sad gracious naïveté of Mallory, as he sets forth the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere. Some indeed might think that it was better to let us rest upon the nobleness of Lancelot than to try to save morality by demonstrating the superiority of Arthur. Demonstration involves discussion, and discussion might leave us sceptical as to whether Guinevere's second thoughts were really best.

There certainly are instances which show beyond question that abstractness and simplicity of treatment are a better safeguard than the best didactic intention. Madame Bovary, not seductive in intention, is undeniably more deterrent in result than the episode of Paolo and Francesca ; but no one would dream of calling it more moral.

Of course it is possible to maintain that all these distinctions are superfluous, that Plato and Savonarola were right; that, no NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 6

matter who treats them, no matter how they may be purified by severe accuracy and aesthetic isolation of treatment, still, dangerous subjects will be always dangerous, that art if permitted to exist at all should be rigidly and consistently subordinate to edification, and that if a few supreme works should be allowed to subsist unmutilated, all production that fell short of supreme perfection should be carefully limited to drawing-room charades and nursery novellettes, and Sunday picture-books, just to keep children of all ages out of mischief. At any rate, this view has the merit of being thorough and intelligible; it is infinitely more respectable than the common view, if it is to be called a view, which emancipates art from rational and ideal restrictions to subject it to restrictions which are shifting and arbitrary, which allows it to call evil good and good evil, so long as it does not violate the conventionalities of the day, and thinks it is quite sufficiently stimulating if it can be got to show the world, or at any rate the little piece of it the public likes to look at, all couleur de

rose.

Only it is to be remembered that if we sacrifice art to morality we must sacrifice other things too. Comfort and liberty and intelligence, to say nothing of such trifles as wealth and luxury, have their temptations as well as art, and Plato and Savonarola would gladly have sacrificed them all. The sacrifice might be rewarded if it could be made: Rousseau thought it would be well to return to barbarism to escape from the inevitable injustices of civilizations; perhaps it might be well to return to the Thebaid to escape from its temptations. But as we are too weak for the Thebaid we do well to endure the temptations of the world lest we should regret them, and among these the temptation of art is not the deadliest because it is the sweetest. Even Plato thought that virtue should be tested by pleasure as well as by pain, and therefore he directed that the citizens of his ideal city should be proved by seeing how they bore themselves when drunk with wine-surely it would have been better to make them drunk with beauty.

Of course Plato wished to make them drunk with beauty too. He thought concrete beauty was the fountain which could quench the ascetic's thirst. But all this while he was thinking of the beauty not of art but of life. He did not underrate,

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perhaps he overrated, the moral value of æsthetic culture; but this high estimate of æsthetic was quite compatible with a very low estimate of art, which he regarded simply as providing instruments for a series of æsthetic exercises to be regulated in accordance with superior regulations, so that a poet had no more right to set up on his own account, and develop his products for their own sake, than if he were a maker of flesh-gloves or dumb-bells. Consequently he had no occasion to discuss the artistic value of morality, though if he had done so he would hardly have been tempted to indulge in an estimate of its æsthetic value so one-sided as to be extravagant. One reason of this one-sidedness was that Greek morality, before the rise of Stoicism, treated the mass of human actions as indifferent; to be left to nature or at best regulated by external conventionalities: consequently the notion of virtue was not lowered by the dulness of duty, it was always identified with the rapturous ecstasy which accompanies great deeds, which are always exceptions even in the life that is fullest of them, or with the calm diffused satisfaction which radiates over the whole of a fortunate and praiseworthy life. Aristotle could still hold that virtue was virtuous in that its works were wrought To Kaλov Evɛka, "for the sake of the Beautiful." Epictetus was not far from the view of Christian asceticism, that good works done from a motive savoring so much of self-satisfaction were hardly virtuous at all.

But even the most picturesque heroism involves sacrifice and suffering, and no sacrifice is without an element that is hardly attractive æsthetically. The comely corpse of the young warrior slain in the front of the battle, in Tyrtæus, is more satisfactory to the æsthetic sense than the soul of Hector flitting to Hades, wailing for the supple strength of the limbs it left in their young prime; but morally the advantage is really on the side of Homer,—it is better to look facts in the face. The saints of life wear no halo, the heroes of life wear no enchanted armor to keep them scathless to the fatal hour that translates them to Valhalla, or Elysium, or Avalon. If it were so, life would hardly be better, but it is a paradox to deny that it would be more beautiful; and it would be a paradox to deny that most of the virtue which enables the world to go on is without any æsthetical value at all. Nor can we take refuge in the con

venient observation that human virtue is never quite perfect, that for the most part it is grossly and glaringly imperfect; for virtue may be all but perfect, and yet be dull, because it is painful, obscure, and, humanly speaking, fruitless. Professor Jowett is quite right in pointing out that a servant girl who spends her wages on a peevish, slatternly mother, and a lazy dissipated brother, is the heir of many beatitudes, but it does not follow that she is a "Beautiful Soul:" fine feelings go the way of fine phrases with those who have to do and suffer overmuch.

And the aspects of morality which have the highest æsthetic value are very far from having the highest artistic value, for literary art at any rate. The best that can be obtained from them is a lyrical or semi-lyrical allusion, that may light up a lower theme. To try to idealize a great deed is only painting the lily; to try to idealize a great purpose is to drift into a labyrinth of mere intellectualism. From this point of view it is instructive to compare the "Idyls of the King" with the "Antigone" of Sophocles, and to notice what proportion the emotional and artistic interest bears in each to the moral and intellectual interest. But if it can be answered without a theory, an ideal problem is better for literature than an ideal character: Wallenstein is lower æsthetically than Tell; artistically King Alfred is less valuable than Richard III. The closing scene of the life of the Emperor Maurice when his children were butchered before his face, and he gave up the last rather than allow the nurse to sacrifice her own, combines almost every element of ethical and æsthetical nobility. At first it seems dramatic, but what could dramatic art add to it? Stage effect perhaps, so far as it is due to the actor; all that a poet could hope to do on his own. account would be to prepare a character to culminate in such a sacrifice. The value of this last is very doubtful. The æsthetical value of Joan of Arc's life lies in the historic moments which it would be impossible to adorn and a profanation to falsify. It is hardly worth while for literature to do what remains, and supplement pictures of concrete heroism with the most delicate analysis of her feelings when the French army was beginning to find her a troublesome visionary, or when she was being brow-beaten into recantation in an English dungeon. It might be done fifty ways

but Etty's picture of her at the stake would always be worth them all. In the same way Delaroche's "Christian Martyr" is a greater addition to the "Golden Legend" than Massinger's "Tragedy on Dorothea," and we need never expect to meet with a poem on Elijah which shall light up the history in the way Mendelssohn's music does. Or to come down to a level where the aesthetic value of morality is not on the heroic scale, who would not give all the graceful books that can be written on Eugénie de Guérin for a portrait of one whose life within its narrow limits was so beautiful? Or to come lower yet, such æsthetical value as the pathos of common life possesses is better represented by Frère than by Dickens, because Frère avowedly represents its momentary aspects, whereas Dickens would have been compelled, if he had not been inclined, to represent the picturesque and pathetic side of poverty as something normal and habitual. The fact is, literature comes too near to life to rise above life at its highest, or to keep above life at its lowest; it is confined to a middle region where it can embellish without falsifying.

And if literature has to turn away from what is best in life, other forms of art by their greater detachment carry us away from life into fairyland, so that here too it is impossible to formulate an ideal relation between average art and average morality, so that practical enthusiasts can always maintain that what is given to art is taken from morality. Yet there is an ideal reason for their co-existence. Life has been compared to a tapestry which is worked on the wrong side; and after all it is this side which we see in morality; in art we see not the right

side, for this is covered up as fast as it is finished, but perhaps some reflection of the pattern too much distorted to be valuable when the tapestry is finished and fixed; till then it has its use: those must work very earnestly who work the faster for looking upon the wrong side alone. Of course it is unsatisfactory to have to think of art and life co-existing in this state of jealous cooperation that can hardly be distinguished from subdued antagonism; but after all this is one of the minor discomforts of an unsettled period in which nothing is satisfactory, though to healthy tempers much is hopeful. To such a temper it would be one hopeful sign that we are beginning to recognize that, as it is ruin and madness to sacrifice morality to artistic eccentricities, so it is folly and loss to sacrifice the normal development of art to moral conventionalities. Though art must always contain something which is a snare to morality, and morality must always cultivate much which is simply an encumbrance to art, we may rest upon the thought that absolute art and absolute morality, though perfectly distinct, are always harmonious. All are bound to practise morality, though the majority can never carry it to its ideal stage; it is the same with the majority of those who are called to cultivate art; but by keeping their eyes on the unattainable, morality will catch some grace, art will be preserved from revolt and excess. By patience and work we may hope to lift a happier generation to a level when the question between morality and art disappears: at all events we shall be lifted ourselves to a world where that question and many others are easily answered and need not be asked. G. A. SIMCOX.

IN the first place, let me start by contradicting every book I have ever read, and consequently the authority of almost every naturalist, as to how snakes bite, and inject their poison. I can only speak for the rattlesnake, it is true; with every other venomous reptile, the orthodox accounts may be correct, but the rattlesnake does not send its poison through its fangs. It is always said that the two fangs which answer somewhat to the human eyeteeth,' are hollow, and perforated at the

bottom, and that the poison flows from the reservoir through this canal to the point of the fang, and thence into the wound. The rattlesnake's fang is certainly hollow, but the point is solid, and the poison-bag, to use a very homely simile, may be compared in its position to a gum-boil; when the animal strikes, the pressure instantly causes a drop of venom to run down outside the tooth into the puncture. I daresay this will be controverted, and I therefore at once give an authority to be referred to.

Mr. W. R. Morley, chief surveyor of the North and South, and United States Central Railways, running through Colorado and New Mexico, is a skilled naturalist who has killed several hundreds of these reptiles, has carefully examined them, and has made them bite when in a position to watch them, and he can speak from more experience than almost any living man, that the poison is injected in the manner described. This accounts for the fact, that rattlesnake-bites are sometimes harmless when the sufferer is bitten through cloth; the poison is absorbed by the material, and never finds its way into the flesh at all.

The rattlesnake is supposed, by those who are likeliest to know, to be extending its area; all writers have hitherto concurred in saying that they were never met with at an elevation of more than six thousand feet above the sea-level; but several recent explorers unite in saying that they are now found much higher. The gentleman just cited as an authority, and whose surveying-party destroyed hundreds of rattlesnakes last autumn, killed forty or fifty at an elevation of about eight thousand feet. Formerly, they declare, they never used to find them so high. The mountain snakes are more vivid in their colors than their brethren of the prairies, and, of the two, are more dreaded on account of their supposed ferocity.

Although, as just said, the rattlesnake is spread almost generally over the North American continent, yet it is, of course, more plentiful in some parts than in others, and Texas probably holds an infinitely larger proportion of reptiles than any other state in the Union. The district lying between the Rio Grande and the Nueces two streams which flow in the same direction at a distance of some sixty or seventy miles-is a desert, barren region, literally swarming with serpents. In summer, you may ride for miles through this district, and not go fifty yards without seeing rattlesnakes. In other parts of Texas, the moccasin is the prevalent snake; while centipedes, scorpions, tarantulas, and the alligator infest various localities, and are each a terrible scourge.

The rattlesnake is perhaps the most sluggish of all the serpent tribe, for even the puff-adder of the Cape, which has that reputation in general, is very active when enraged; but the rattlesnake, excepting

just after and just before its winter-sleep, never bites excepting in self-defence, and does not go out of its way to attack any one. Unless molested, there is very little to fear from this snake; but the misfortune is, that you cannot tell when you are going to molest it, as, in coming down a bluff, or picking your way in a gully, you may, with the best intentions in the world, put your foot on a rattlesnake. And then the terrific swiftness of his dart! Not even the cobra, which I had always considered rivalled the very lightning in its movements-movements which I will defy any Europan eye to follow-is quicker than the rattlesnake in that one deadly act. Yet, to strike, it must be in a close coil, its head and neck being erect; it throws itself out about three-fourths of its length, supporting its weight entirely on the tail-part. I have, however, known two persons who have trodden on rattlesnakes and have escaped; a third, as will be seen, was still more remarkably fortunate. One, a gentleman who has killed more than fifty of them, recognised what his foot touched without stopping to look, and jumped higher than he had probably ever done before in his life; the other was not so quick, and the reptile struck him three times with electric quickness, but his trousers and long boots saved him. This disposes of a fallacy very generally held, that venomous serpents will not bite twice in succession: there were the three pair of fang-marks quite plainly to be seen on his white trousers. One young man who was bathing in the river Platte had a more extraordinary escape still, for, on emerging from the water, he sat down, being, of course, completely naked, on a rattlesnake which was basking in the grass. Whether he sat upon the reptile's head, or whether the creature was too astonished by his sudden descent, can never be known, but certain it is, that the affrighted bather leaped up with a shriek, and escaped unhurt.

It is told that this particular serpent has a very offensive odor when irritated, and that Dr. Hamilton Roe owed his life to a knowledge of that fact. The physician having opened a box directed to the Superintendent of the Zoological Gardens, London, put his hand-most rashly, it seems to me-under the dry moss which appeared, to see what was there. He touched something alive, and the smell told him it