bravery and humility in their order; nor
that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the
characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what
is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in
which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and
temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and
Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;
it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.

There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within
it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the
growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each
reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is
immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is
cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a
work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time,
place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so
great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination,
the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture,
like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power
to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of
different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if
the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.
Such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in Homer,
something in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an increasing
portion in Milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping
to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the
natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living;
they have achieved such immortality as art allows. They have done so,
not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their
representative character. These ideal works of the highest range, which
embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the
successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and
state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race
from race, civilization from civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or
Christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are
solved, as personality in its individual form is solved