ing them. We never love the memory
of any one unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.

I have seen it urged, again, in querulous accents, that the so-called
immortality even of the most immortal is not for ever. I see a passage
to this effect in a book that is making a stir as I write. I will quote
it. The writer says:--

"So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of
departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life
they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant
but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak
directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or
laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which
imagination holds the secret. Driven from the marketplace they become
first the companions of the student, then the victims of the
specialist. He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them
must train himself to penetrate the veil which in ever-thickening
folds conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone of
a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien associations, he
must think in a language not his own." {5}

This is crying for the moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for the
writer is obviously insincere. I see the _Saturday Review_ says the
passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find
many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free
from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting
over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as
many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This,
however, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of the writer was not so
obviously that of cheap pessimism. I know not which is cheapest,
pessimism or optimism. One forces lights, the other darks; both are
equally untrue to good art, and equally sure of their effect with the
groundlings. The one extenuates, the other sets down in malice. The
first is the more amiable lie, but both are lies, and are known to be so
by those who utter them. Talk about catching the tone of a vanished
society to understand Rembrandt or Giovanni Bellini! It's nonsense--the
folds do not thicken in front of these men; we understand them as well as
those among whom they went about in the flesh, and perhaps better. Homer
and Shakes