ire to give satisfaction to both exigencies is the surest means,
unless you have reached the terminus of perfection, to miss both ends.
If the modern poet thinks he feels enough of the Greeks' mind to vie with
them, notwithstanding all the indocility of his matter, on their own
ground, namely that of simple poetry, let him do it exclusively, and
place himself apart from all the requirements of the sentimental taste of
his age. No doubt it is very doubtful if he come up to his models;
between the original and the happiest imitation there will always remain
a notable distance; but, by taking this road, he is at all events secure
of producing a really poetic work. If, on the other hand, he feels
himself carried to the ideal by the instinct of sentimental poetry, let
him decide to pursue this end fully; let him seek the ideal in its
purity, and let him not pause till he has reached the highest regions
without looking behind him to know if the real follows him, and does not
leave him by the way. Let him not lower himself to this wretched
expedient of spoiling the ideal to accommodate himself to the wants of
human weakness, and to turn out mind in order to play more easily with
the heart. Let him not take us back to our infancy, to make us buy, at
the cost of the most precious acquisitions of the understanding, a repose
that can only last as long as the slumber of our spiritual faculties; but
let him lead us on to emancipation, and give us this feeling of higher
harmony which compensates for all his troubles and secures the happiness
of the victor! Let him prepare as his task an idyl that realizes the
pastoral innocence, even in the children of civilization, and in all the
conditions of the most militant and excited life; of thought enlarged by
culture; of the most refined art; of the most delicate social
conventionalities--an idyl, in short, that is made, not to bring back man
to Arcadia, but to lead him to Elysium.

This idyl, as I conceive it, is the idea of humanity definitely
reconciled with itself, in the individual as well as in the whole of
society; it is union freely re-established between inclination and duty;
it is nature purified, raised to its highest moral dignity; in short, it
is no less than the ideal of beauty applied to real life. Thus, the
character of this idyl is to reconcile perfectly all the contradictions
between the real and the ideal, which formed the matter of satirical and
elegiac poetry, and, setti