beauty as a snare; and even those who have hearts susceptible of both find that a practical crisis will come when a choice must be made whether of the two they will serve.  The consciousness of this disunion has of late years been felt deeply, and by the most gifted minds.  Painful often has the conflict been, when the natural love of beauty was leading one way, loyalty to that which is higher than beauty called another, and no practical escape was possible, except by the sacrifice of feelings which in themselves were innocent and beautiful.  Only in recent times have we begun to feel strongly that both are good, that each without the other is so far imperfect, and that some reconciliation, if it were possible, is a thing to be desired.  Violent has been the reaction which this new consciousness has created.  In the recoil from what they call Puritanism, or religion without culture, many have given themselves up to culture without religion, or, at best, with a very diluted form of religion.  They have set up for worship the golden calf of art, and danced round it to the pipe which the great Goethe played.  They have promulgated what they call the gospel of art,—­as Carlyle says, the windiest gospel ever yet preached, which never has saved and never will save any man from moral corruption.”

It were something beside my purpose to unfold and illustrate in detail the common principles of Art:  I shall but endeavour to do this so far as may be needful for a due understanding of those principles as we have them embodied in the Shakespearian Drama.

The first of those principles, as I am to view them, is what I know not better how to designate than by the term Solidarity.  By which I mean that the several parts of a given work must all stand in mutual sympathy and intelligence; or that the details must not only have each a force and meaning of their own, but must also be helpful, directly or remotely, to the force and meaning of the others; all being drawn together and made to coalesce in unity of effect by some one governing thought or paramount idea.  This gives us what the philosophers of Art generally agree in calling an organic structure; that is, a structure in which an inward vital law shapes and determines the outward form; all the parts being, moreover, assimilated and bound each to each by the life that builds the organization, and so rendered mutually aidant, and at the same time conducive to the well-being of the whole.  In a word, they must all have a purpose and a truth in common as well as each a truth and purpose of its own.

To illustrate this in a small instance, and perhaps the more intelligible for being small.—­Critics had been wont to speak lightly, not to say sneeringly, of the Sonnet, as being but an elaborate trifle that cost more than it came to.  Wordsworth undertook to vindicate the thing from this unjust reproach, as he considered it; and to that end he wrote the following: