ruly indispensable, just as we must accept
also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts
whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation. But both Taine's list and
Lowell's we feel to be too brief. The French critic had ranged thru
every realm of art to discover finally that the incontestable masters
were four and four only. The American critic, altho he limited himself
to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not
distinguishing between the poets and the masters of prose.

If we strike out of Lowell's list the single name of Cervantes, who was
a poet only in a special and arbitrary sense, we shall have left the
names of the four poets whose fame is world-wide--Homer, Dante,
Shakspere, Goethe--the only poets whose supremacy is admitted thruout
our modern civilization.

To these Matthew Arnold insisted on adjoining a fifth, Milton; and we
who speak the same tongue would gladly enroll the blind singer with the
other four. Indeed, we might even hold Milton to be securer in this
place than Goethe, who has not yet been a hundred years in his grave.
But if we ask the verdict of "the whole group of civilized nations,"
which Matthew Arnold himself impaneled as "free from all suspicion of
national and provincial partiality," we are met with the doubt whether
Milton has established himself among the races that inherit the Latin
tradition as securely as Dante has been accepted by the peoples of
Teutonic stock. However high our own appreciation of Milton may be, the
cosmopolitan verdict might not include him among the supreme poets.
Indeed, we may doubt whether Vergil might not have more votes than
Milton, when the struck jury is polled.

Here, perhaps, we may find our profit in applying a test suggested by
Lowell--the test of imitability. "No poet of the first class has ever
left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable," whereas "the
secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates
itself into mannerism." The greater geniuses may have influenced those
who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to
the sum of human knowledge; but "they have not infected contemporaries
or followers with mannerism." Then Lowell points out that "Dante,
Shakspere, and Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their
expression."

It was in his lecture on Emerson that Matthew Arnold asked: "Who are the
great men of letters?"--meaning thereby the mast