sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he
chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been so. We are
sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded at the dawn of
poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that
the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they
walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost
without changing could pass into song. The snow lies thick now
upon Olympus, and its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but
once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from
the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to
the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to
other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our
historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry
is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to
be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the
result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest,
there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-
consciousness and the critical spirit are one.

ERNEST. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely
you would admit that the great poems of the early world, the
primitive, anonymous collective poems, were the result of the
imagination of races, rather than of the imagination of
individuals?

GILBERT. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a
beautiful form. For there is no art where there is no style, and
no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.
No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as
Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work,