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 112 CRITICAL NOTICES : features, are related to dramatic art. The historian, however, is restricted by facts and by the actual order of events ; and the end of philosophic writing is not the concrete presentation of cha- racter, but truth in its generality. Here therefore the artistic element either expresses itself imperfectly or is something extrane- ous to the end of the writer. Again oratory, in its emotional element, has a certain resemblance to lyric poetry. But in listen- ing to an oration the mind is not allowed to rest in aesthetic enjoyment ; an appeal is made to the will : hence poetry does not permit the rhetorical except as an element in a whole, as for example in the drama. It has been said that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose but science. Prof. Carriere's discussion of the relations of the various forms of literary art shows us in what sense this may be accepted. We may say with a certain truth that prose is anti- thetical to poetry not in itself, but only in so far as it is the organ of science ; but we may equally w r ell select another use to which prose may be put, namely, its use as a means of influencing ac: and oppose this at once to its artistic elaboration and to its use as a means of communicating knowledge. In this way we arrive at rhetoric as a second antithesis to poetry. This antithesis is better than the first ; for, as has been seen, it is especially by the absence of disinterestedness that oratory is distinguished from lyrical verse ; and disinterestedness has been selected as pre- eminently the character of art. On further reflection we find that this character of disinterestedness ought not to be taken abso- lutely as the character of art, but is really common to it with science and philosophy. Now rhetoric, with respect to this cha- racter, is equally opposed to philosophy and science on the one hand and to art on the other. And the best critics have found the rhetorical spirit as inconsistent with the spirit of poetry as it is with the spirit of philosophy. On the contrary there is no absolute inconsistency between poetry and science. A truth of science, as Prof. Carriere says, may become poetical under im- passioned contemplation. The element of " strangeness" in beauty, referred to in a well- known passage of Bacon's Essays, has of late played an important part in aesthetic theories developed from quite different points of view. It has been made by literary critics the distinctive cha- racter of Eomantic art, and by Darwin (in the DC*-: id <>f Ma//) the starting-point of the earliest development of aesthetic feeling in the human race. Both these views have points of contact with Prof. Carriere's account of the origin of art. The mind, he s; in order to obtain aesthetic pleasure from the forms of external things, has need of the stimulus of the unaccustomed. An example of the pleasure thus obtained is seen in the morbid attraction of the horrible and of all strong stimulation (i. 10, 254). The emotion obtained from the unaccustomed does not, however, in itself constitute aesthetic pleasure. There is need further of a