ce or scene has
become that composite mixture of man and nature, fact and mind, which
is art. And this is as true of all books which are meant to be
literature as of painting or sculpture. The story of Electra is,
broadly speaking, the same for Aeschylus, Sophocles, {59} and
Euripides: but each contributes to it himself, and the result differs.
Virgil's tale of Troy is not Homer's: Chaucer gives us one Troilus and
Cressida, and Shakespeare another: the fable of the Fox and the Goat
takes prose from Phaedrus and poetry from La Fontaine. So Pope's Homer
is not Homer, the thing in itself, the unrelated, absolute Homer, but
_Pope additus Homero_; and it is not Euripides pure and simple which is
the true account of certain beautiful modern versions of Euripides, but
_Euripidi additus Murray_.

It may be objected that these are all instances from poetry, where the
truth aimed at is rather general than particular. And this distinction
is a real one. The truth of the _Aeneid_ is its truth to human life as
a whole, not its accuracy in reporting the words used on particular
occasions by Dido and Turnus, neither of whom may have ever existed.
History and biography are, undoubtedly, on a different footing in this
respect, just as the artist who calls his picture "Arundel Castle" or
"Windermere" is not in the same position of freedom as the painter of
an "Evening on the Downs." But the law of _homo additus naturae_ still
remains true in this case as in the other, though its application is
modified. It is true that a {60} man who pretends to give a
representation of Arundel is not justified in adding to it a tower 800
feet high just because he happens himself to have a fancy for towers.
But what he has to add, if his work is to be art at all, is the
emotional mood, the exaltation, depression, excitement, or whatever it
may be, which Arundel stirred in him, and by means of which he and the
scene before him were melted into that unity of intensified life which
is born of the marriage of nature and man and is what we call art. The
next day another man takes his place, and the result, though still
Arundel Castle, is an entirely different picture. So in the case of
books. The same Socrates is seen in one way when we get that part of
him which could unite with the personality of Xenophon, and in quite
another when the union is with Plato. The English Civil War marries
one side of itself to Clarendon, and another to Milton; and b