Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/44

14 But it is precisely the arts in which anybody can the crown of few. dabble that the elect raise to heights of dignity and beauty. Those who realize this indulge a pardonable foible if they desire to reserve, like the Egyptian priests, certain mysteries, if only pro magnifico. Besides, there are periods when the utility of artistic analysis is not readily accepted by those who make opinion. Economics and sociology, for example, largely absorb the interest of one of our most scholarly journals. Its literary and art columns are ably conducted. The A traditional undervaluation. chief editor, however, told me that he knew little of æsthetics, and cared to know less; and in such a way as to warrant an inference that, though well disposed, he looked upon art and song and poetry very much as Black Bothwell regarded clerkly pursuits,—that they were to him what Italian music seemed to Dr. Johnson, in whose honest eyes its practitioners were but fiddlers and dancing-masters. This undervaluation by a very clever man is partly caused, if not justified, one must believe, by the vulgarization of the arts of beauty and design. Yet these arts belong as much to the order of things, and indirectly make as much for wealth, as the science of economics, and they make as much for social happiness as the science of sociology,—if, indeed, they are to be excluded from either.

Can we, even here, take up poetry as a botanist