he is correct in his view.-Lord Lytton gives expression to
similar thoughts-his description of Helen.-Senior's criticism
on this description.-So far the definition of Art as the
Empire of the Unknown has been explained solely by refer-
ence to Poetry. See the same definition as it applies to Music.
-Music is the art which has more direct connection than any
other with the Unknown of Thought.-Beethoven and Shake-
speare compared-the comparison impossible.-The definition
applied to the Arts of Painting and Sculpture.-The Arts of
Painter and Sculptor exhibit the precision of Science; and the
Painter's Art especially is very strictly tied to fact.-But
Science is not enough.-The Pictorial artist reaches to some-
thing beyond Science.-The artists who adhere to bare facts-
what are they?—Their Art wants the essential quality of Art.
-But if the domain of Art is the Unknown, how can it ever
be the subject of Science?-The question answered by re-
ference to Biology, which is the Science of something the
essence of which is unknown

Page 311

INTRODUCTION.

VOL. I.

B

THE GAY SCIENCE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

the title.

HAVE called the present work the CHAPTER Gay Science, because that is the shortest description I can find of its Meaning of aim and contents. But I have ventured to wrest the term a little from its old Provençal meaning. The Gay Science was the name given by the troubadours to their art of poetry. We could scarcely now, however, call poetry, The term or the art of poetry, a science. It is true that the distinction between science and art has always been very hazy. In our day it has been as hotly disputed as among the schoolmen whether logic be a science or an art, or both. Even so late a writer as Hobbes classes poetry among the sciences, for it is in his view the

Science.

CHAPTER Science of magnifying and vilifying. I hope I. before I have finished this work to trace See Chapter more accurately than has yet been done the IX. dividing line between science and art; but, in

The Gay
Science, be-

science of

This the

doctrine of

3000 years.

the meantime, there is no doubt that poetry must take rank among the arts, and that the name of science in connection with it must be reserved for the critical theory of its processes and of its influence in the world. Such is the sense in which the word is used upon the title pages of the present volumes.

Why the Gay Science, however? The lighthearted minstrels of Provence insisted on the

pleasure. joyfulness of their art. In the dawn of modern literature, they declared, with a straightforwardness which has never been surpassed either by poets or by critics, that the immediate aim of art is the cultivation of pleasure. But it so happens that no critical doctrine is in our day more unfashionable than this-that the object of art is pleasure. Any of us who cleave to the old creed, which has the prescription of about thirty centuries in its favour, are supposed to be shallow and commonplace. Nearly all thinkers now, who pretend to any height or depth of thought, abjure the notion of pleasure as the object of pursuit in the noble moods of art. But what if these high-fliers are wrong and the thirty centuries are right? What, if not one of those who reject the axiom of the thirty centuries can agree with another as to