There might seem to be no place left for novelty or originality,--place only for a patient, an infinite, faultlessness.

On this question too Flavian passed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting, at the threshold of his work.

Was poetic beauty a thing ever one and the same, a type absolute; or, changing always with the soul of time itself, did it depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of apprehension, the fashion, as we say, of each successive age?
Might one recover that old, earlier sense of it, that earlier manner, in a masterly effort to recall all the complexities of the life, moral and intellectual, of the earlier age to which it had belonged?
Had there been really bad ages in art or literature?
Were all ages, even those earliest, adventurous, matutinal days, in themselves equally poetical or unpoetical; and poetry, the literary beauty, the poetic ideal, always but a borrowed light upon men's actual life?
Homer had said-- Hoi d' hote de limenos polybentheos entos hikonto, Histia men steilanto, thesan d' en nei melaine...
Ek de kai autoi bainon epi phegmini thalasses.+ And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was always telling [101] things after this manner.

And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time, naturally, intrinsically, poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or, the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in "the great style," against a sky charged with marvels.

Must not the mere prose of an age, itself thus ideal, have counted for more than half of Homer's poetry?
Or might the closer student discover even here, even in Homer, the really mediatorial function of the poet, as between the reader and the actual matter of his experience; the poet waiting, so to speak, in an age which had felt itself trite and commonplace enough, on his opportunity for the touch of "golden alchemy," or at least for the pleasantly lighted side of things themselves?
Might not another, in one's own prosaic and used-up time, so uneventful as it had been through the long reign of these quiet Antonines, in like manner, discover his ideal, by a due waiting upon it?
Would not a future generation, looking back upon this, under the power of the enchanted-distance fallacy, find it ideal to view, in contrast with its own languor--the languor that for some reason (concerning which Augustine will one day have his view) seemed to haunt men always?
Had Homer, even, appeared unreal and affected in his poetic flight, to some of the people of his own age, [102] as seemed to happen with every new literature in turn?
In any case, the intellectual conditions of early Greece had been--how different from these! And a true literary tact would accept that difference in forming the primary conception of the literary function at a later time.