Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/594

 The Lawyer in Literature. sary to touch the sensibilities of the individual in order to create in him the mood. From the dawn it has been known to the lyric poet, but the artist missed it until the Florentine came in the f1fteenth century. Pheidias and his school passed producing the outside, but not the inside of the Greek. Later, under the porticos of Florence, in a land of expanded summer, Sandro Botti celli caught the mood and left it in the faces of his Madonnas; and Luca della Robbia tangled it in somehow in his pale colors; and Leonardo Da Vinci painted it with such deft skill into the portraits of Ludovico's mis tresses that they have outlived the saints; and the great Michelangelo, " with a genius spirit ualized by the reverie of the middle age," traced, wherever his hand moved, this inten sity of expression which troubled men like a great passion — traced it even in that wasting snow-image which he moulded, with scorn, by the command of Piero de' Medici. The lyric poet, I have said, knew the secret from the beginning, and other men of letters have on occasion obtained this fine result, some by laws which they comprehend, and others by accidental hap, I think, as one stumbles on a treasure while groping in the dark. William Morris understood it well, when he told the most beautiful tales that men have ever listened to. Simple, but strong and sweet, leaving us dreaming in a land of selfish passions for that faith which the Sun dering Flood could not divide and that love which led the wanderer of Upmeads to the Well at the World's End. Browning knew, for his lines whisper like wonderful voices from beyond the world which we ought to understand, and Rossetti and Swinburne knew. Master craftsmen! There is some thing in your verses that keeps saying to us, "Eccovie! These men have heard the Choral Seven." The mood, then, is the virtue of this type of literature. To make men feel what he would have them feel, is the object of the artist. It is also the object of the advocate.

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For no one knows better than he, that truth is a mere matter o view-point; that men are pleased or troubled by the order in which events are marched by them; that they are melted or hardened as the deeps of their emotion are moved; and, finally, that their sense of right is merely the finished mood. And knowing this, it is the business of his life to create that mood. It is his labor to study the intricate nature of men and both the natural and the artistic sequence of events, that he may know, when he looks into a man's face, what it is that this man has been accustomed to regard as truth; in what order and under what lights and shadows events must be marched by him; and just what string of his emotion it is advisable to twang. But this is not enough. He has usually un der our system of legal procedure twelve men to deal with. An instrument of strange and inharmonious notes, grossly out of tune, and from this by deft handling he must finally obtain a perfect harmony. Delicate business, gentlemen : a note omit ted, a key jarring, an error never so slight in the swift estimate of the delicate response to be had from the deeps of each human pipe, and all goes banging into discord. Deli cate business! To be appreciated only by the surgeon cutting away death, down among naked nerves at the roots of life. It is clear, then, that the learned advocate — this deft handler of human passions — is working at the very fountain-head of all art, and the other workers are his brethren, only younger and somewhat given over to dreams. If this is precious knowledge, indispensable to all literary excellence, is not that one who comes from the learned profession of the law best equipped among all the craftsmen? If fact is to be reproduced, he has under his fingers the rules by which all fact is to be determined; if the nature of men is to be dealt with, he has sounded every deep and shoal of it; if the waters of the heart are to be troubled, he knows the way down into the pool. And he claims no esoteric secret, no