Whether such was the unconscious, or (as I think likely) the more
or less conscious, purpose of him who fashion'd those marvellous
architectonics, is a secondary question.
A THOUGHT ON SHAKSPERE
The most distinctive poems--the most permanently rooted and with
heartiest reason for being--the copious cycle of Arthurian legends, or
the almost equally copious Charlemagne cycle, or the poems of the Cid,
or Scandinavian Eddas, or Nibelungen, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or
_bona fide_ Ossian, or Inferno--probably had their rise in the great
historic perturbations, which they came in to sum up and confirm,
indirectly embodying results to date. Then however precious to
"culture," the grandest of those poems, it may be said, preserve and
typify results offensive to the modern spirit, and long past away. To
state it briefly, and taking the strongest examples, in Homer
lives the ruthless military prowess of Greece, and of its special
god-descended dynastic houses; in Shakspere the dragon-rancors and
stormy feudal Splendor of mediaeval caste.
Poetry, largely consider'd, is an evolution, sending out improved
and-ever-expanded types--in one sense, the past, even the best of it,
necessarily giving place, and dying out. For our existing world,
the bases on which all the grand old poems were built have become
vacuums--and even those of many comparatively modern ones are broken
and half-gone. For us to-day, not their own intrinsic value, vast as
that is, backs and maintains those poems--but a mountain-high growth
of associations, the layers of successive ages.
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