estion, hold sway for an
enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe
as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The
conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and
shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of
Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare,
and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and
brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of
the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are
indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the
ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like
to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.

But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an
element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that
imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function
in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest
use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the
trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves.
Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the
eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with
the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our
whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In
spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of
imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make
settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make
facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since
they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book
blazes with blasphemy.

Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal.
But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This
Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like
fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as
tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to
dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil
seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance
passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem
frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray