Heroic renascence—nor those, indeed, of any age preceding our own—for our immediate delectation; we are quite well satisfied with such splendors as they show in our backward view, while pleased by their very remoteness.
Since the beginning of the individualistic development, which has been mainly Indo-European, and the first impulse of which was Hellenic, a few eminent writers stand for the times in which they lived—for their limitations as well as for their advantages,—and because of the durability of manuscript and of the printed page, though much has been lost, enough of their writings remain to us for our just estimate and appreciation. There is not one of them we would willingly lose from the retrospect, though for many an age before ours whole groups of them have been eclipsed, sometimes by wilful neglect, but more often by fateful oblivion. Whatever Dante may have meant to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, or to such prose-writers as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, he certainly meant nothing to Dryden and Addison, to Goethe or Voltaire. During the distinctively medieval period the great writers of Greece and Rome were hidden behind the barbaric veil; and, in turn, the wonders wrought inside that veil—the cathedrals, the chansons, the lyrics of troubadour and minnesinger, the Nibelungenlied, the poems of the Elder Edda, the heroic romances, and the mystery plays—were ignored in the ages which followed and which were illuminated by the revival of ancient culture, until the mighty reaction in the last half of the eighteenth century drew aside the veil and disclosed and magnified these wonders as a new inspiration to the imagination. In Queen Anne's reign all the great Elizabethan dramatists except Shakespeare and all the great poets who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century except Milton were well-nigh forgotten. Even Spenser was scarcely read. Until the middle of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was but a nominis umbra on the Continent.
Our own age, including the last generation, may be said to be the only one which has the complete retrospect within the range of its clear vision and catholic appreciation. In another way the whole past is peculiarly ours—that is, as a part and not the mere background of our culture. We have no present inseparable from this past. Yet there is a present which, as something which is passing into the future, has a note of its own so distinct and independent as in one sense to repudiate the past—that is, repudiate it as something standing alongside, as an explicit factor in what is going on.
Such is our indebtedness to the past that we are never inclined to boldly enough assert this exclusiveness. We would not welcome Spenser's Faerie Queene as a poem of to-day. Plato's Republic or Sir Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie or his Arcadia would fall upon dull ears for any present appeal. Scott's romances, widely as they are read, for the romantic interest that endures, would be no more welcome as present productions than Milton's epics or Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. All the great works of the past which we delight in as past would as works of to-day encounter that kind of resentment, mingled with wonder, which is aroused by what is alien, by things born out of their time.
Imaginative values are everlasting, but every age has its own form and habit which seem alien to another, and are only tolerated out of their time because of the essential excellence which they invest.
The merely outward costume and custom are attractive to us when reproduced for us in painting, play, or story, because of their novelty and picturesqueness, but we would not suffer them in the familiar intercourse of every-day life. Even the graceful minuet of the eighteenth century does not win its way with us except on the stage or as a contrived spectacle.
But the style of a writer is something nearer to his individual spirit and to the spirit of his time than any outward form. It cannot pass from age to age (an age in this connection, of course, not being limited to a generation) and still seem native to the time. Whatever its heritage of precious possessions, every age has its own work to do, creatively. No future development can give us another Dante or Shakespeare, or even another Scott. The world has had these in their own proper time and still has them as inalienable treasures; therefore it does not need their reincarnation.
