that original vivacity, that direct sense of
actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early
literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvellous has
in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, however, grows
remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward
meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it
becomes spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated in
lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal
enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human
scale. The pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art
which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in
Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in
Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in his church on earth, as in
many an English poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and
shows a purely spiritual body.

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. It
is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the
beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war
for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and
justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which
refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will
of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle
within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are
the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most
savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.
Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely
objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous,
condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in
illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its
tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the
words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of
moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of
whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its
air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like