Yet there was a reverse to the medal; for such qualities necessarily
involved defects, which, hardly perceptible and of small importance in
the work of the early masters of the Classical school, became more
prominent in the hands of lesser men, and eventually brought the whole
tradition into disrepute. It was inevitable that there should be a
certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence
deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art;
and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than
any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with
unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out. The beauties of clarity,
simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at; and to attain them
involved the abandonment of other beauties which, however attractive,
were incompatible with those. Vague suggestion, complexity of thought,
strangeness of imagination--to us the familiar ornaments of poetry--were
qualities eschewed by the masters of the age of Louis XIV. They were
willing to forgo comprehensiveness and elaboration, they were ready to
forswear the great effects of curiosity and mystery; for the pursuit of
these led away from the high path of their chosen endeavour--the
creation, within the limits they had marked out, of works of flawless
art. The fact that they succeeded so well is precisely one of the
reasons why it is difficult for the modern reader--and for the
Anglo-Saxon one especially, with his different æsthetic traditions--to
appreciate their work to the full. To us, with our broader outlook, our
more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright
world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some
patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty
that it contains. Nor is this our only difficulty: the classical
tradition, like all traditions, became degenerate; its virtues hardened
into mannerisms, its weaknesses expanded into dogmas; and it is
sometimes hard for us to discriminate between the artist who has