ages is part of each one of us: to deduct from that experience, to
obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a
past age, as if the Middle Age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth
century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little [224]
child, or enter again into the womb and be born. But though it is
not possible to repress a single phase of that humanity, which,
because we live and move and have our being in the life of humanity,
makes us what we are, it is possible to isolate such a phase, to
throw it into relief, to be divided against ourselves in zeal for it;
as we may hark back to some choice space of our own individual life.
We cannot truly conceive the age: we can conceive the element it has
contributed to our culture: we can treat the subjects of the age
bringing that into relief. Such an attitude towards Greece, aspiring
to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving life, is what is
possible for art.

The modern poet or artist who treats in this way a classical story
comes very near, if not to the Hellenism of Homer, yet to the
Hellenism of Chaucer, the Hellenism of the Middle Age, or rather of
that exquisite first period of the Renaissance within it. Afterwards
the Renaissance takes its side, becomes, perhaps, exaggerated or
facile. But the choice life of the human spirit is always under
mixed lights, and in mixed situations, when it is not too sure of
itself, is still expectant, girt up to leap forward to the promise.
Such a situation there was in that earliest return from the
overwrought spiritualities of the Middle Age to the earlier, more
ancient life of the senses; and for us the most attractive form of
[225] classical story is the monk's conception of it, when he escapes
from the sombre atmosphere of his cloister to natural light. The
fruits of this mood, which, divining more than it understands,