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Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of the Christian faith have not only come up for reëxamination but have been compelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gone farther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a half before. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom.
So, the reader who has allowed himself to rest long in the simple magic evoked by Malory or in the Celtic air of Villemarque's legends, will be fain to ask whether a man of Tennyson's force could not have given to his century a recasting which would have satisfied primitive credulity as well as modern subtility.
Now it is evident that, in most cases, instinct could not have perfected itself by simple accretion: each new piece really requires, if all is not to be spoiled, a complete recasting of the whole. How could mere chance work a recasting of the kind?
Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of poetry; it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting which is observable in the style of the passage from Milton a style which seems to have for its cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special intensity to his way of delivering himself.
And finally, in 1623, he brought out in Latin a greatly enlarged recasting of the Advancement; the nine books of the "De Augmentis." But the great scheme was not completed; portions were left more or less finished. Much that he purposed was left undone, and could not have been yet done at that time. But the works which he published represent imperfectly the labour spent on the undertaking.
The most continuous experience has been unsuccessful in shaking this grave delusion. Philosophers and historians have endeavoured in vain to prove its absurdity, but yet they have had no difficulty in demonstrating that institutions are the outcome of ideas, sentiments, and customs, and that ideas, sentiments, and customs are not to be recast by recasting legislative codes.
In some wardens' accounts the proceeds of these ales form a yearly recurring and an ordinary receipt item; in others ales were resorted to when some unusually large sum had to be raised, or some heavy expense was to be met, such as the rebuilding of the church tower, the recasting of the bells, the raising of a stock to set the poor to work, or the buying of a silver communion cup.
His recasting of Hyperion opens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to live in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against the English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal beauty. But it is in formal beauty the formal beauty especially of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, which has never been surpassed in literature that his own achievement lies.
What could be farther from serving one's own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what had been the real service to a day gone by? There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be the only way to save the things that war had left him. That perhaps he could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving.
The circumstance that he was obliged to write so much that did not satisfy him in this case may account partly for his relinquishing the theme, as one which for him had lost its seductiveness through too much recasting. It need be added only that the original manuscript, from which the following pages are printed through the medium of an exact copy, is singularly clear and fluent.
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