The product, after standing long enough, mantled over
with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if
not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made out
of the same material. But who has ever read the _Achilleis_, correct in
all _un_essential particulars as it probably is?
It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other respects, made
such booty of the world around him, whose observation of manners was so
minute, and whose insight into character and motives, as if he had been
one of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without question,
as we do Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his
confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy instinct
rather than to the conscientious perfecting of exceptional powers till
practice made them seem to work independently of the will which still
directed them,--it is impossible that such a man should not also have
profited by the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose
familiar society he lived, that he should not have over and over again
discussed points of criticism and art with them, that he should not have
had his curiosity, so alive to everything else, excited about those
ancients whom university men then, no doubt, as now, extolled without too
much knowledge of what they really were, that he should not have heard
too much rather than too little of Aristotle's _Poetics_, Quinctilian's
_Rhetoric_, Horace's _Art of Poetry_, and the _Unities_, especially from
Ben Jonson,--in short, that he who speaks of himself as
"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what he most enjoyed contented least,"
and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human concern,
should never have turned his thought to the principles of that art which
was both the delight and business of his life, the bread-winner alike for
soul and body.
Pages:
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276