mastered the convention in which he works, and the artisan who is the
slave of it. The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what
fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit
behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too
often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained--a finicky
pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long
outworn. Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the
classical tradition died of timidity. It grew afraid of the flesh and
blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to
tread the common ground of fact and detail; it would touch nothing but
generalities, for they alone are safe, harmless, and respectable; and,
if they are also empty, how can that he helped? Starving, it shrank into
itself, muttering old incantations; and it continued to mutter them,
automatically, some time after it had expired.

But, in the heyday of the age of Louis XIV, literature showed no signs
of such a malady--though no doubt it contained the latent germs of the
disease; on the contrary, the masterpieces of that epoch are charged to
the full with vitality and force. We may describe them, in one word, as
worldly--worldly in the broadest and the highest acceptation of the
term. They represent, in its perfect expression, the spirit of this
world--its greatness, its splendour, its intensity, the human drama that
animates it, the ordered beauty towards which it tends. For that was an
age in which the world, in all the plenitude of its brilliance, had come
into its own, when the sombre spirituality of the Middle Ages had been
at last forgotten, when the literatures of Greece and Rome had delivered
their benignant message, when civilization could enjoy for a space its
new maturity, before a larger vision had brought questionings, and an
inward vision aspirations unknown before. The literature of those days
was founded upon a general acceptance--acceptance both in the sphere of