different, but it is the secret of
Art to "eradicate the matter by means of the form."' Phrases and
statements like these meet us everywhere in current criticism of
literature and the other arts. They are the stock-in-trade of writers
who understand of them little more than the fact that somehow or other
they are not 'bourgeois.' But we find them also seriously used by
writers whom we must respect, whether they are anonymous or not;
something like one or another of them might be quoted, for example, from
Professor Saintsbury, the late R. A. M. Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe
himself; and they are the watchwords of a school in the one country
where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as a rule, from men who
either practise one of the arts, or, from study of it, are interested in
its methods. The general reader--a being so general that I may say what
I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels that he is being robbed of
almost all that he cares for in a work of art. 'You are asking me,' he
says, 'to look at the Dresden Madonna as if it were a Persian rug. You
are telling me that the poetic value of _Hamlet_ lies solely in its
style and versification, and that my interest in the man and his fate is
only an intellectual or moral interest. You pretend that, if I want to
enjoy the poetry of _Crossing the Bar_, I must not mind what Tennyson
says there, but must consider solely how he says it. But in that case I
can care no more for a poem than I do for a set of nonsense verses; and
I do not believe that the authors of _Hamlet_ and _Crossing the Bar_
regarded their poems thus.'

These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on the one side, form,
treatment, handling on the other, are the field through which I
especially want, in this lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of
battle; and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but the cries of
the combatants are terribly ambiguous. Those phrases of the so-called
formalist may each mean five or six different things. If they mean one,
they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general reader not
unnaturally takes them, they seem to me false and mischievous. It would
be absurd to pretend that I can end in a few minutes a controversy which
concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads perhaps to problems not
yet soluble; but we can at least draw some plain distinctions which, in
this controversy, are too often confused.

In the first place, then, let us take 'subject' in one