cing
the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of
modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works
conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its
transitoriness.

The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will
not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but
their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those
who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon
their judgement, not of literary works only, but of men and events in
general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and
impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the
empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among
those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile
their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and
whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well;
they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in
themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--[Greek:
chalepon], as Pittacus said, [Greek: chalepon esthlon emmenai]--and
they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can
assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any
art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old
artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves
with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves
with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own
times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their
age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium
of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to
the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of
feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the
age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for
supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age
commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development
and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do
nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are
great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what
is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can
supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but