strokes of the
imagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that
imaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and
for a long time. He would have met with, at his own door, story-tellers
among whom the perfection of Greek art was indeed as unknown as his own
power of detailed description, but who, none the less, imagined or
remembered beautiful incidents and strange, pathetic outcrying that made
them of Homer's lineage. Flaubert says somewhere, 'There are things in
Hugo, as in Rabelais, that I could have mended, things badly built, but
then what thrusts of power beyond the reach of conscious art!' Is not
all history but the coming of that conscious art which first makes
articulate and then destroys the old wild energy? Spenser, the first
poet struck with remorse, the first poet who gave his heart to the
State, saw nothing but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all
the fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were
shepherds and shepherdesses still living the life that made Theocritus
and Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he
dreamed of Virgil's shepherds he wrote a book to advise, among many like
things, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of
all 'the wandering companies that keep the woods.' His _View of the
State of Ireland_ commends indeed the beauty of the hills and woods
where they did their shepherding, in that powerful and subtle language
of his which I sometimes think more full of youthful energy than even
the language of the great playwrights. He is 'sure it is yet a most
beautiful and sweet country as any under heaven,' and that all would
prosper but for those agitators, 'those wandering companies that keep
the woods,' and he would rid it of them by a certain expeditious way.
There should be four great garrisons. 'And those fowre garrisons issuing
foorthe, at such convenient times as they shall have intelligence or
espiall upon the enemye, will so drive him from one side to another and
tennis him amongst them, that he shall finde nowhere safe to keepe his
creete, or hide himselfe, but flying from the fire shall fall into the
water, and out of one daunger into another, that in short space his
creete, which is his moste sustenence, shall be wasted in preying, or
killed in driving, or starved for wante of pasture in the woodes, and he
himselfe brought soe lowe, that he shall have no harte nor a