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It is with the Moderns, and not with the Ancients that he has to deal; it is the present and the future, and not the past that he 'breaks his sleeps' for. Whether the Ancients used those fables for purposes of innovation, and gradual encroachment on error or not, here is a Modern, he tells us, who for one, cannot dispense with them in his teaching.
The progress of arts and knowledge, and the great changes that have happened in the manners of mankind, are objects far more worthy of a leader's attention than the revolutions of fortune. And it is chiefly to Voltaire that we owe this instructive species of history. Pope. He has not only been the father of it among the moderns, but has carried it himself to its utmost perfection. Boileau.
It was possible to overlook the liberties taken by the tragedians, according as their subject might require it, with the Unities of Place and Time, on which such ridiculous stress has been laid by many of the moderns, but the bold manner in which the old comic writer subjects these mere externalities to his sportive caprice is so striking, that it must enforce itself on the most short-sighted observers: and yet in all the treatises on the constitution of the Greek stage, due respect has never yet been paid to it.
The strong point of these differences is the way in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them, of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediævals had it in theory at any rate.
We have broken up, or are attempting to break up, Nature's ancient tribal machinery and at the present time are striving to replace her designs by others evolved in the minds of modern statesmen and politicians. We moderns are like hill sheep turned into fenced fields with all our wandering instincts still grafted on our original nature. As in them, our instincts are at war with our surroundings.
And the better to judge of the Reasons that some of the Moderns have given to prove the Being of Men Pygmies, I have laid down as Postulata's, that hereby we must not understand Dwarfs, nor yet a Nation of Men, tho' somewhat of a lesser size and stature than ordinary; but we must observe those two Characteristicks that Homer gives of them, that they are Cubitales and fight Cranes.
"It is a rough truth that Plato is Moses atticizing," said Vernon to Dr. Middleton, to keep the diversion alive. "And that Aristotle had the globe under his cranium," rejoined the Rev. Doctor. "And that the Moderns live on the Ancients." "And that not one in ten thousand can refer to the particular treasury he filches." "The Art of our days is a revel of rough truth," remarked Professor Crooklyn.
We shall, I think, find this is what Greco did for Cézanne, and it is Cézanne who was among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco. They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the fine illusion of life.
According to his view, I should do well to limit to Egyptian soil what I had gained by investigation, and to make Grecian life, which was familiar to us moderns as the foundation of our aesthetic perceptions, more prominent. The advice was good, and, keeping it in view, I began to subject the whole romance to a thorough revision.
Dickens was shaking his head, and apparently about to refuse the honour, when a voice from among the moderns I could not see who it was for the crowd said: "Suppose we begin at the end of the table and work round, any one contributing a little as the fancy seizes him?"
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