but advance. The progress is in most cases grovelling and low. Men are not better for it all, but only better off. Will any who have known our Universities these twenty, thirty, forty years, tell us that the more recent men have been of a distinctly higher stamp than those who had preceded them? Is not the proportion of self-culture for its own sake greatly reduced, and the pursuit of learning very much become a hunt for fellowships, or, as upon the turf, to get well placed'? This all requires abatement and correction, and the change, as in most moral revolutions, must be made not in the upper but the lower orders of society. Morals do not descend, and Christianity was proclaimed and first received among the poor. The workmen are our masters, and, we hear, should be instructed; what if this instruction should but lead them to increasing aptitude for selfishness and base enjoyment, and the whole political machine should be a means of levelling the people down to a low state of rude or polished luxury? Nothing can be more dangerous and prejudicial to the State than the neglect of the imaginative power among men. For many years greed has been blessed, and honoured, and exalted to the position of a peace-maker. But greed never has maintained a nation's self-respect and dignity; and it is only by the cultivation of the noble qualities of imagination, which rise greatly above greed, and, seeking true nobility, find it in work and sacrifice, that the position of England as a leader among the nations can be secured and made a blessing. If the imagination is not thus developed, the working men will, as they become instructed, become also increasingly obnoxious and depraved, and vulgar knowingness and vain impatient levity will, as in other regions, be the ruling characteristics of the people. We have occasionally to regard with pity and some scorn the French elector who declines or fears to vote for the salvation of society. Our working men are similarly impotent, though not perhaps in politics, yet in all that most concerns their actual work. They are acute and clever to a folly about pay, but for all else their minds have been crushed out of them; and in the great and many-sided building trade, ubiquitous and constant in its movement, the whole class of working men is sunk into the lowest state of mental and imaginative feebleness. We have given to the workman power in political affairs, but we entirely deny his right and special fitness to direct his own. He obtains his share numerically in the election of the Government that rules us all, but he is counted quite incapable to manage his own work, and, like a beast of burden or a child, is put in harness or in leading-strings, and reined and guided, 'blinkered' and controlled. There There is no question how the working man must be improved. He must first be recognised. Let us suppose that some successful picture-dealer were to quote the various paintings in his gallery as his own productions, and that the names and individuality of all the painters were entirely disregarded, and we shall understand at once the unnatural condition of the workman, and perceive how much the decadence of painting would be promoted by such oblivious folly. This, notwithstanding, is our almost universal custom in regard to every art that we have not dubbed 'fine,' and so the working man becomes an alien and outcast from 'society.' But we may hear that the upraising of the workman is a revolutionary project, and that its tendency would be to shatter the foundations of society. The truth, however, is entirely otherwise, and we appeal to feelings perfectly conservative when we declare that the great want of England is a wide-spread class of true imaginative workmen-men who, free from jealousy of other ranks, because they feel the dignity and comfort of their own, would never favour violent or revolutionary change, and yet would be most prompt to see and indicate whatever change is needed. These true gentlemen would soon become the efficient balance-weight of all society, and from their business contact with all classes, and their sympathy with each, would bring them into harmony throughout the social scale. They would maintain the state of the world;' and, their works and ways being entirely public, they would give no opportunity for suspicion or occasion for distrust. None would readily resent their interference or advice; they could speak with the vulgar as well as think with the wise, and without effort would obtain the confidence of the proprietary as well as of the operative classes in a way that what is called the middle class could never hope to emulate. Having commenced by quoting our Historian's opinion of the method and results of modern architectural practice, let us now collect and hear what Goethe has to say about artistic Dilettanteism. The Dilettants,' who still maintain their social and professional influence in architectural affairs, he has described as 'Those who, without any particular talent for art, only give way to the natural imitative tendency in them, and among other things to the imitation of Gothic Architecture. Their passion for imitation has no connection with inborn genius for art. They do little good to artists or to art; but, on the contrary, much harm, by bringing artists down to their level. The Dilettante is honoured, and the artist is neglected. In Dilettanteism the loss is always greater than the gain. It takes from from art its essence, and spoils the public by depriving it of its artistic earnestness and sense of right. It follows the lead of the time; whereas true art gives laws and commands the time. Dilettanteism presupposes art as botchwork does handicraft; and the Dilettante holds the same relation to the artist that the botcher does to the craftsman. From handicraft the way is open to rise in art but not from botchwork. The best of all preparation is to have even the lowest scholar take part in the work of the master. The Dilettante has never more than a half-interest in art, but the artist, who is the true connoisseur, has an unconditional and entire interest in art and devotion to it. The true artist rests firmly and securely on himself, and so incurs the less danger in departing from rules; and may even, by that means, enlarge the province of art itself. Dilettanti, or rather botchers, seem not to strive like the true artist towards the highest possible aim of art, nor to see what is beyond, but only what is beside them; on this account they are always comparing. Dilettanti are plagiarists. They enervate and pull to pieces all that is original in manner or matter; and at the same time imitate, copy, and piece out their own emptiness with it. The publicity and permanence of architectural works renders the injurious effect of Dilettanteism in this department more universal and enduring, and perpetuates false taste; because in art the things that are conspicuous and widely known are generally made to serve again for models. The earnest aim of a true architectural work gives it a harmony with the most important and exalted moments of man; and botchwork in this case does him an injury in the very point where he might be most capable of perfection." Art, Thus Art is not to be attained by Dilettante schemes or fanciful designs; or by a vain expenditure of wealth; or even by some recondite researches in the path of knowledge. Art is the noble end of steady and laborious work; the glory and reward of honest, thoughtful, self-devoted handicraft. 'when a reality, indicates something impressive and sublime. It stamps a man with the divine seal; setting him before us as invariably impelled to do a divine thing. Work is not to him. a profession, but a vocation. It is not something which he chooses for himself, but for which he is chosen; which he does not advance to because he will, but because he must. The man is not at liberty to decline the call.' Such was the MasterWorkman of the past, whose free imaginative power has ever been the life of Art; and, in like manner, the emancipated Workman, gloriously impelled,' must always be, and is, the only real hope of English Architecture. ᎪᎡᎢ . ART. IV.-1. Sartor Resartus. By Thomas Carlyle. Popular edition. London, 1871. 2. Latter-day Pamphlets. By the Same. Popular edition. London, 1871. 3. Culture and Anarchy. By Matthew Arnold, D.C.L. London, 4. Literature and Dogma. By the Same. 7. Essays on the Renaissance. TH London, 1873. By the Same. London, 1869. By W. H. Pater. London, So HE struggle between the Girondins and the Jacobins in the first French Revolution has a far wider significance than the passing strife of rival factions. It represents the rupture between two elementary forces of the Revolution, temporarily combined for a common object of destruction-the men of action and the men of letters. The philosophic party, of which the Girondins were the political expression, had given the movement its first form and impulse, had clothed it in heartstirring phrases, specious sophistry, and brilliant romance. long as action was restricted to an assault on existing institutions, the Monarchy, the Aristocracy, and the Church, the Girondins were the men who encouraged and guided the mind of the people. But when, after the revolution of the 10th August, the philosophers found themselves, for the first time in the history of the world, the sole rulers of a great nation, their political incapacity was at once apparent. Not one act of statesman-like energy can be credited to the Girondins during the brief period of their power. They were undecided before the enemy on the frontier, impotent among the mob in Paris, powerful only within the walls of the Assembly, and after a bare year of nominal rule all of the party who were not in hiding in the provinces had perished beneath the guillotine. What was the cause of a rise so prodigious and a fall SO disastrous? The aim of the literary or Girondin party was perfection-a dream that has always attracted and amused the minds of philosophers. Plato had given it form in his "Republic;" Bacon and Sir Thomas More in the Atlantis' and 'Utopia. But both the last were the mere sportive fancies of practical statesmen, while Plato says of his own republic: 'Perhaps in heaven there is laid up a pattern of it for him who wishes to behold it, and beholding to organise himself accordingly. And the question of its present or future existence on earth is quite unimportant." unimportant.' The problem was not strange to theology, and on speculations of the kind Butler remarks, with his usual strong sagacity: Suppose now a person of such a turn of mind to go on with his reveries, till he had at length fixed upon some plan of nature as appearing to him the best;-one shall scarce be thought guilty of detraction against human understanding, if one should say, even beforehand, that the plan which this speculative person would fix on, though he were the wisest of the sons of men, would not be the very best, even according to his own notions of the best.' Yet this finite capacity of the human mind was precisely what the revolutionary philosophers refused to admit. Each of them assumed that the conception of perfection he had himself formed had a positive external equivalent. Hence their reasoning was constructively valueless, for it was based on a petitio principii, or an assumption of what it was really necessary to prove. On the other hand, the magic of the word 'perfection, and the natural inclination of men to overlook its essentially relative character, made it irresistible as a weapon of destruction. 'It would be advisable,' said Danton, speaking in the Girondin dialect, that the Convention should issue an address to assure the people that it wishes to destroy nothing, but to perfect everything; and that if we pursue fanaticism, it is because we desire perfect freedom of religious opinion.' How easy on such premises to argue that all human frailties and crimes were to be ascribed to the imperfection of existing institutions, and that if the belief in revealed religion and the fear of tyrannous authority were destroyed, the mind would re-assert its native dignity! So, at least, reasoned Condorcet, who thought that the first step towards perfection was to annihilate the idea of a personal God. And such was the dream of Madame Roland, who, in her hatred of an aristocracy socially superior to herself, conceived that the earth, relieved of such an incubus, would presently bring forth Brutuses and Timoleons with all the austere virtues of imaginary republics. No wonder, therefore, that when the first fruits of Liberty and Equality appeared in the September massacres and the rise of the Mountain, the Girondins were filled with dismay and despaired of the situation. The character of the party is well expressed in the epigram of Dumouriez, who said that the republic, as conceived by the Girondins, was like the romance of a clever woman. Girondism has survived the Girondins. Though checked on the field of politics, Philosophy has not yielded one tittle of her pretensions to universal spiritual dominion. But she has shifted |