Philosophy itself Smacks of the age it lives in, nor is true Save by the apposition of the present. And truths of olden time, though truths they be, And living through all time eternal truths, Yet want the seas’ning and applying hand Which Nature sends successive. Else the need Of wisdom should wear out and wisdom cease, Since needless wisdom were not to be wise. EDWIN THE FAIR. ATHERTON. A pleasant little knot to set us, Gower,—to determine the conditions of your art. WILLOUGHBY. And after dinner, too, of all times. GOWER. Why not? If the picture-critics would only write their verdicts after dinner, many a poor victim would find his dinner prospects brighter. This is the genial hour; the very time to discuss æsthetics, where geniality is everything. WILLOUGHBY. Do you remember that passage in one of our old plays (I think it was in Lamb I saw it), where the crazed father asks all sorts of impossible things from the painter. He wants him to make the tree shriek on which his murdered son hangs ghastly in the moonlight. GOWER. Salvator has plenty of them, splintered with shrieking. WILLOUGHBY. But this man’s frenzy demands more yet:—make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, and in the end leave me in a trance,—and so forth. ATHERTON. Fortunate painter—a picture gallery ordered in a breath! WILLOUGHBY. By no means. Now does this request, when you come to think of it, so enormously violate the conditions of the art? Seriously, I should state the matter thus:—The artist is limited to a moment only, and yet is the greater artist in proportion as he can not only adequately occupy, but even transcend that moment. GOWER. I agree with you. Painting reaches its highest aim when it carries us beyond painting; when it is not merely itself a creation, but makes the spectator creative, and prompts him with the antecedents and the consequents of the represented action. ATHERTON. But all are not equal to the reception of such suggestions. GOWER. And so, with unsusceptible minds, we must be satisfied if they praise us for our imitation merely. WILLOUGHBY. Yet even they will derive more pleasure, though unable to account for it, from works of this higher order. Those, assuredly, are the masterpieces of art, in any branch, which are, as it were, triumphal arches that lead us out into the domain of some sister art. When poetry pourtrays with the painter,— GOWER. My favourite, Spenser, to wit.—