critic must inevitably be swayed by his personal tastes and sympathies. A too subservient attitude towards the latter can only lead to an ex parte expression of opinion, valuable as such in proportion to the natural taste of the critic, but devoid of constructive importance. Beauty, being a relative quality, is measured by the sum of its manifestations, knowledge of which is the basis of all true criticism. The immensity of his subject, once completely realised, soon makes the critic aware of the comparative unimportance of his own likes and dislikes to aesthetic analysis; but if the consciousness of having acquired the true critical insight should ever tempt him to become presumptuous or judicial, let him remember the immortal failure of Ruskin to detect the hyperæsthesia of the Whistlerian colour sense.

The question of the degree of actual technical knowledge, if any, necessary to the critic, is an interesting one admitting of much argument. It is so difficult, when one has acquired any kind of technique, to remember that its restraining laws are not administrative, but empirical, and therefore liable to be rendered obsolete at any moment by further experiment. It is precisely their inability to refrain from administering the laws as they know them which renders unreliable the judgment of most composers and official musicians. Of course, the critic should be able to read music and grasp the form and intention of a composition, but fundamentally it appears evident that, however equipped, the man who could be deceived by defective or clumsy craftmanship would have mistaken his vocation, as his critical instinct could only be of the

meanest order. He should be quite capable of feeling the quality of the technique displayed, by the same intuitive process which prevents a man of culture, but no technical knowledge, from filling his cabinet with Brummagem, or hanging his walls with daubs. On the other hand, his authority can be materially strengthened by knowledge of musical theory, but not of a musical theory. As commonly understood, the word merely covers the official curriculum which deals with an infinitesimal portion of the whole theory of music.

Even then he may at any moment be confronted with a problem not to be solved by all his philosophy. The composer of original personality makes technique in defiance of the schools, and to be thorough in this respect the critic would have to be familiar beforehand with the technique of each new star appearing on the horizon. Otherwise, how can he appraise it? Official knowledge will frequently only prejudice him against the unfettered working of his aesthetic judgment.

No; let him absorb whatever quantity of theory he considers conducive to his purpose, but the fact will remain that the training of the critic is criticism. He must devour an immense quantity of music of all styles and periods, not merely by hearing it, but by careful analysis and comparison in the study, until the whole subject of musical aesthetics begins to take shape in his mind. He must know two or three languages in order to keep abreast of every movement in the world of music, of which we in England feel only some occasional backwash. He must be an omnivorous reader, and follow with a

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certain degree of competence the phenomena presented by the literature and representative arts of his own and the preceding generation, because of their enormous reaction on music. Romanticism in Germany; poetic symbolism and the so-called decadence in France; impressionism in painting; all these are matters appertaining to his art, in ignorance of which he will ever be at a loss to discern the precise significance of the art-work before him. He must be a master of a certain literary impres sionism, in order to be able to reproduce for others the effect of the music he has heard. It will take the best years of his life and no small amount of money to equip him, as his library and musical experience must be as complete as possible, and when at last he is able to account to himself, logically and dispassionately, for every shade of every conclusion he arrives at, he will find himself contradicted by the first comer, who will tell him that it is all a matter of opinion.*

* It is perhaps necessary to state that the concluding paragraphs on musical criticism are adapted from an article of mine on that subject written in 1909.

THE LITERARY SOURCES OF MILTON'S

"LYCIDAS."

BY SIR JOHN EDWIN SANDYS, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.,

F.R.S.L.

[Read January 28th, 1914.]

As a newly elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature I rejoice to learn that, in proposing to study the literary sources of Milton's "Lycidas," I am acting in accordance with the traditions of the Society. In one of the "Milton Memorial Lectures" of 1908, our historian, Sir Edward Brabrook, has shown that each successive generation of our Fellows has devoted itself to the study of Milton; and, in another of those lectures, our former Fellow, Prof. Saintsbury, has found a signal example of the grand style" in Milton's "Lycidas."

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In dealing with the sources of this pastoral elegy, I propose to follow, not the order of the lines of "Lycidas," but the chronological sequence of the sources themselves. Let us begin then, not with

Homer (as is usual), but with Hesiod.

In "Lycidas," the Muses are invoked in the well-known

lines:

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring"

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This "sacred well" is sometimes identified with the Pierian spring, at the foot of the Thessalian Olympus, the great Homeric seat of the gods, the first home of the Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, before their worship was transferred to the Boeotian Helicon.* I agree, however, with those who hold that Milton is here referring, not to Olympus, but to Helicon, the " Aonian mount, above which he "intends to soar," in "Paradise Lost" (i, 15), and that the source of this invocation is to be found, not in Homer, but in Hesiod. The Theogony" begins thus: "From the Muses of Helicon let us begin to sing." In the context, the Muses are described as "dancing round the altar of the mighty Zeus." This is certainly the same as "Jove's altar," "round about" which the Muses sing in "Il Penseroso" (47 f.); and it is probably the same as "the seat of Jove" in this passage of "Lycidas.' The Muses are next described by Hesiod as bathing in the fountain of Hippocrene, one of the springs of Helicon, probably the "sacred spring" of our text. To Hesiod, the shepherd of Ascra, the Muses give (a few lines later) the gift of song, but there are others whom the Muses rebuke as "shepherds dwelling in the fields, base reproaches, mere bellies." The phrase at once reminds us of the "blind mouths" in Lycidas," the hireling-shepherds, who, "for their bellies' sake, creep and intrude, and climb into the fold" (14 f, 19).

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From the shepherd of Ascra we pass to the pastoral poets of the Sicilian school: Theocritus, who flourished about 275 B.C., and lived, not only

*Milton's Poems,' ed. Masson (1890), iii, 255.