Studious youth, indeed, on
its mettle about "scholarship," though actually of listless humour
among books that certainly stirred the past, makes a docile act of
faith regarding the witchery, the thaumaturgic powers, of Virgil, or
may we say of Shakespeare? Yet how faint and dim, after all, the
sorrows of Dido, of Juliet, the travail of Aeneas, beside quite
recent things felt or done--stories which, floating to us on the
light current of to-day's conversation, leave the soul in a flutter!
At best, poetry of the past could move one with no more directness
than the beautiful faces of antiquity which are not here for us to
see and unaffectedly love them. Gaston's demand (his youth only
conforming to pattern therein) was for a poetry, as veritable, as
intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the
flowers of the actual season. The poetry of mere literature, like
the dead body, could not bleed, while there was a heart, a poetic
heart, in the living world, which beat, bled, spoke with irresistible
power. Elderly [53] people, Virgil in hand, might assert
professionally that the contemporary age, an age, of course, of
little people and things, deteriorate since the days of their own
youth, must necessarily be unfit for poetic uses.
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