inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves
nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed, through a long decline, by
the pallor of reflected glories. Even the irresistible novelty of
personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and
the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or
in Shakespeare had as good not be. He is a replica and a shadow, a
foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was
never guilty of tautology. This is the error of the classical
creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye
can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never
be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and
finality. Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her
prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in
the ice-palaces that they build to house it. In their search for
permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of
generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is
transformed into a science, their expression into an academic
terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the
arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed
becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make
acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice
tends, should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences. There
words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless,
scentless, dried weeds, a hortus siccus of proper names, each
individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea.
No wind blows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to
discompose the melancholy workers at their task of tying Latin
labels on to withered sticks. Definition and division are the
watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and