in this
imperfect state."

The distinction, on which Wotton insisted, between the sciences which
require ages for their development and the imaginative arts which may
reach perfection in a short time had been recognised by Fontenelle,
whose argument on this point differs from that of his friend Perrault.
For Perrault contended that in literature and art, as well as in
science, later generations can, through the advantage of time and longer
experience, attain to a higher excellence than their predecessors.
Fontenelle, on the other hand, held that poetry and eloquence have a
restricted field, and that therefore there must be a time at which
they reach a point of excellence which cannot be exceeded. It was his
personal opinion that eloquence and history actually reached the highest
possible perfection in Cicero and Livy.

But neither Fontenelle nor Wotton came into close quarters with the
problem which was raised--not very clearly, it is true--by Perrault. Is
there development in the various species of literature and art? Do they
profit and enrich themselves by the general advance of civilisation?
Perrault, as we have seen, threw out the suggestion that increased
experience and psychological study enabled the moderns to penetrate more
deeply into the recesses of the human soul, and therefore to bring to a
higher perfection the treatment of the character, motives, and passions
of men. This suggestion admits of being extended. In the Introduction
to his Revolt of Islam, Shelley, describing his own intellectual and
aesthetic experiences, writes:

The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our
own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an
enjoyment.... I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive sense;
and have read the poets and the historians and the metaphysicians whose
writings have been accessible to me--and have looked upon the beautiful
and majestic scenery of the earth--as common sources of those elements
which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine. And he
appends a note:

In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of
fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates
of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to
science.

In other words, all the increases of human experience, from age to age,
all the speculative adventures of the intellect, provide the artist,
in each succeeding genera