d this quality too might have its measure of
euphuistic charm, direct and sensible enough, though it must count, in
comparison with that genuine early Greek newness at the beginning, not
as the freshness of the open fields, but only of a bunch of
field-flowers in a heated room.

There was, meantime, all this:--on one side, the old pagan culture, for
us but a fragment, for him an accomplished yet present fact, still a
living, united, organic whole, in the entirety of its art, its thought,
its religions, its sagacious forms of polity, that so weighty authority
it exercised on every point, being in reality only the measure of its
charm for every one: on the other side, the actual world in all its
eager self-assertion, with Flavian himself, in his boundless animation,
there, at the centre of the situation. From the natural defects, from
the pettiness, of his euphuism, his assiduous cultivation of manner, he
was saved by the consciousness that he had a matter to present, very
real, [103] at least to him. That preoccupation of the dilettante with
what might seem mere details of form, after all, did but serve the
purpose of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity,
certain strong personal intuitions, a certain vision or apprehension of
things as really being, with important results, thus, rather than
thus,--intuitions which the artistic or literary faculty was called
upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model
within. Flavian too, with his fine clear mastery of the practically
effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in
literature: that to know when one's self is interested, is the first
condition of interesting other people. It was a principle, the
forcible apprehension of which made him jealous and fastidious in the
selection of his intellectual food; often listless while others read or
gazed diligently; never pretending to be moved out of mere complaisance
to people's emotions: it served to foster in him a very scrupulous
literary sincerity with himself. And it was this uncompromising demand
for a matter, in all art, derived immediately from lively personal
intuition, this constant appeal to individual judgment, which saved his
euphuism, even at its weakest, from lapsing into mere artifice.

Was the magnificent exordium of Lucretius, addressed to the goddess
Venus, the work of [104] his earlier manhood, and designed originally
to open an argument less per