You can pick up a cricket ball with your hand; you can handle a ten-foot spherical buoy with a crane. But how are you to deal with a rounded mass several miles across? How are we to deal with _mountains_ of ineptitude? How is criticism to approach those last new literary moods which are deaf to the ancients? I fear it cannot deal with such moods at all. If a man feels like that, he feels like that, and one can say no more. And if there is to come a time when men shall read:
_Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,_
and make no more of it than "Passengers must cross the line by the bridge. Penalty £5," why, there it is! Things have their rising and their setting. But before that day comes may the earth cover me.
If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes, as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete, I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing this, at random, a vagary of the mind.
But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain length.
There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For instance:
_Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me_ _Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus._
This is not only a beautiful phrase, it is also true--and I am grateful to the Delian. I will do my best never to put him out. I will keep by me a few flowers for such a patron.
By the way, talking of that lovely couplet, do you know (it is true, it is not a lie, I have the very words before me as I write)--do you know that a gentleman still living translated that couplet thus: "Phœbus loves me and I in my turn have gifts for Phœbus--laurels, and the sweet blush of the hyacinth."
But this is not so wrong a rendering after all as that for which a contemporary of mine was once responsible in the noblest and most learned of the Oxford Colleges. For this man said (viva voce, it is true) that certain Greek lines which really meant "at evening soft dew descends upon the earth," signified in English, "Towards nightfall the huge female sea monster crawls up upon the sand." Each a picture; the one sweet, the other strong--but how different one from the other!