and circumstances, have
great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet's work, and to
make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really
possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here
also we over-rate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language
of praise which is quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a
second fallacy in our poetic judgments--the fallacy caused by an
estimate which we may call personal.

Both fallacies are natural. It is evident how naturally the study of the
history and development of a poetry may incline a man to pause over
reputations and works once conspicuous but now obscure, and to quarrel
with a careless public for skipping, in obedience to mere tradition and
habit, from one famous name or work in its national poetry to another,
ignorant of what it misses, and of the reason for keeping what it keeps,
and of the whole process of growth in its poetry. The French have become
diligent students of their own early poetry, which they long neglected;
the study makes many of them dissatisfied with their so-called classical
poetry, the court-tragedy of the seventeenth century, a poetry which
Pellisson[68] long ago reproached with its want of the true poetic
stamp, with its _politesse sterile et rampante?_[69] but which
nevertheless has reigned in France as absolutely as if it had been the
perfection of classical poetry indeed. The dissatisfaction is natural;
yet a lively and accomplished critic, M. Charles d'Hericault,[70] the
editor of Clement Marot, goes too far when he says that "the cloud of
glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a
literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history." "It
hinders," he goes on, "it hinders us from seeing more than one single
point, the culminating and exceptional point, the summary, fictitious
and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes a halo for a
physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a man, and hiding
from us all trace of the labor, the attempts, the weaknesses, the
failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how
the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model. Above all, for the
historian this creation of classic personages is inadmissible; for it
withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper life, it breaks
historical relationships, it blinds criticism by conventional
admiration, and renders the investiga