In no other way can one affect the world than in responding
thus to its needs, in embodying thus its ideas. You will see, in looking to
history, that all great men have been a piece of their time; take them out
and set them elsewhere, they will not fit so well; they were made for their
day and generation. The literature which has left any mark, which has been
worthy of the name, has always mirrored what was doing around it; not
necessarily daguerreotyping the mere outside, but at least reflecting the
inside,--the thoughts, if not the actions of men,--their feelings and
sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may
discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing
idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too,
will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this
law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished
in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity
represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because
they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have
another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic
architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this
century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no
such Catholicism to inspire the builders; the very men who reared them
would not be architects, if they lived to-day.
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