n really bad ages in art or literature? Were all ages, even those
earliest, adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally poetical
or unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal,
always but a borrowed light upon men's actual life?

Homer had said--

Hoi d' hote de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto,
Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.+

And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was
always telling [101] things after this manner. And one might think
there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical
transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which
one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the
sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the great
style," against a sky charged with marvels. Must not the mere prose of
an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer's
poetry? Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer,
the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and
the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in
an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his
opportunity for the touch of "golden alchemy," or at least for the
pleasantly lighted side of things themselves? Might not another, in
one's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been
through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner,
discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it? Would not a future
generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the
enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its
own languor--the languor that for some reason (concerning which
Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always? Had
Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some
of the people of his own age, [102] as seemed to happen with every new
literature in turn? In any case, the intellectual conditions of early
Greece had been--how different from these! And a true literary tact
would accept that difference in forming the primary conception of the
literary function at a later time. Perhaps the utmost one could get by
conscious effort, in the way of a reaction or return to the conditions
of an earlier and fresher age, would be but novitas, artificial
artlessness, naivete; an