gue suggestion, complexity of thought,
strangeness of imagination--to us the familiar ornaments of poetry--were
qualities eschewed by the masters of the age of Louis XIV. They were
willing to forgo comprehensiveness and elaboration, they were ready to
forswear the great effects of curiosity and mystery; for the pursuit of
these led away from the high path of their chosen endeavour--the
creation, within the limits they had marked out, of works of flawless
art. The fact that they succeeded so well is precisely one of the
reasons why it is difficult for the modern reader--and for the
Anglo-Saxon one especially, with his different aesthetic traditions--to
appreciate their work to the full. To us, with our broader outlook, our
more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright
world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some
patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty
that it contains. Nor is this our only difficulty: the classical
tradition, like all traditions, became degenerate; its virtues hardened
into mannerisms, its weaknesses expanded into dogmas; and it is
sometimes hard for us to discriminate between the artist who has
mastered the convention in which he works, and the artisan who is the
slave of it. The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what
fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit
behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too
often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained--a finicky
pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long
outworn. Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the
classical tradition died of timidity. It grew afraid of the flesh and
blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to
tread the common ground of fact and detail; it would touch nothing but
generalities, for they alone are safe, harmless, and respectable; and,
if they are also empty, how can that he helped? Starving, it shrank into
itself, muttering old incantations; and it continued to mutter them,
automatically, some time after it had expired.

But, in the heyday of the age of Louis XIV, literature showed no signs
of such a malady--though no doubt it contained the latent germs of the
disease; on the contrary, the masterpieces of that epoch are charged to
the full with vitality and force. We may describe them, in one word, as
worldly--worl