ve them. Even genius must wait for the gifts of time.
It cannot forerun the limitations of its day, nor anticipate the
conquests and common possessions of the future. Things are impossible to
the first great masters of art which are easy to their second-rate
successors. The possibility, or the necessity of breaking through some
convention, of attempting some unattempted effort, had not, among other
great enterprises, occurred to them. They were laying the steps in a
magnificent fashion on which those after them were to rise. But we ought
not to shut our eyes to mistakes or faults to which attention had not
yet been awakened, or for avoiding which no reasonable means had been
found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is
still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is
no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon,
which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the
scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But
all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always
limited and imperfect.

The _Faery Queen_, as a whole, bears on its face a great fault of
construction. It carries with it no adequate account of its own story;
it does not explain itself, or contain in its own structure what would
enable a reader to understand how it arose. It has to be accounted for
by a prose explanation and key outside of itself. The poet intended to
reserve the central event, which was the occasion of all the adventures
of the poem, till they had all been related, leaving them as it were in
the air, till at the end of twelve long books the reader should at last
be told how the whole thing had originated, and what it was all about.
He made the mistake of confounding the answer to a riddle with the
crisis which unties the tangle of a plot and satisfies the suspended
interest of a tale. None of the great model poems before him, however
full of digression and episode, had failed to arrange their story with
clearness. They needed no commentary outside themselves to say why they
began as they did, and out of what antecedents they arose. If they
started at once from the middle of things, they made their story, as it
unfolded itself, explain, by more or less skilful devices, all that
needed to be known about their beginnings. They did not think of rules
of art. They did of themselves naturally what a good story-teller doe