llusion
with mortal life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed,
and in expressing appropriated, some recurring human moods, some mocking
renunciations; and he knew that his spirit was immortal, being linked
and identified with that portion of the truth. He had become a little
spokesman of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats more or less
articulately; and even if he should cease to be honoured in men's
memories, he would continue to be unwittingly honoured and justified in
their lives.

What we may conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace's
apprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame.
With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression
involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth
genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and
fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When the
Virgin in the Magnificat says, "Behold, from henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed," the psalmist surely means to express a
spiritual exaltation exempt from vanity; he merely translates into a
rhetorical figure the fact that what had been first revealed to Mary
would also bless all generations. That the Church should in consequence
deem and pronounce her blessed is an incident describing, but not
creating, the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus the
outward sign or recognition of an inward representative authority
residing in genius or good fortune, an authority in which lies the whole
worth of fame. Those will substantially remember and honour us who keep
our ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have
anticipated.

Free society differs from that which is natural and legal precisely in
this, that it does not cultivate relations which in the last analysis
are experienced and material, but turns exclusively to unanimities in
meanings, to collaborations in an ideal world. The basis of free society
is of course natural, as we said, but free society has ideal goals.
Spirits cannot touch save by becoming unanimous. At the same time public
opinion, reputation, and impersonal sympathy reinforce only very general
feelings, and reinforce them vaguely; and as the inner play of sentiment
becomes precise, it craves more specific points of support or
comparison. It is in creatures of our own species that we chiefly scent
the aroma of inward sympathy, because it is th