e motives of many
actions that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and
we set these cloudy actions among solid-looking houses, and what we hope
are solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end, slain by our desire
to increase it. In his art, as in all the older art of the world, there
was much make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember the time
when, as my nurse used to tell me, herons built their nests in old men's
beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in _Richard III._
where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but had his scenery been
as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple back cloth that made Dido and AEneas
seem wandering on the edge of eternity, he would have found nothing absurd
in pitching the tents of Richard and Richmond side by side. Goethe has
said, 'Art is art, because it is not nature!' It brings us near to the
archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their
looking-glass.

III

In _La Peau de Chagrin_ Balzac spends many pages in describing a coquette,
who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an improbable
incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully she can sing.
Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing, and in her chatter
with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self. He would have us
understand that behind the momentary self, which acts and lives in the
world, and is subject to the judgment of the world, there is that which
cannot be called before any mortal Judgment seat, even though a great
poet, or novelist, or philosopher be sitting upon it. Great literature has
always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of
Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George
Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had
been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else. George
Eliot had a fierceness one hardly finds but in a woman turned
argumentative, but the habit of mind her fierceness gave its life to was
characteristic of her century, and is the habit of mind of the
Shakespearian critics. They and she grew up in a century of
utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed important except his
utility to the State, and nothing so useful to the State as the actions
whose effect can be weighed by the reason. The deeds of Coriolanus,
Hamlet, Timon, Richard II. had no obvious use, were, indeed, no more th