epoch historians appear; chroniclers and critics with the third. The personages of the ode are colossal—Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epics are giants—Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic." Nor is this all. The supposed law of literary progress extends beyond the domain of social and individual humanity, and the same triple aspect of progress may be observed in the magnificent phenomena of physical nature. "It might be consistent to add that everything in Nature and in life assumes these three phrases of progress—the lyric, the epic, the dramatic—since everything has its birth, its action, and its death. If it were not absurd to intermingle relations fancied by the imagination with strict deductions of reason, a poet might say that sunrise, for example, is a hymn, noonday a brilliant epic, sunset a sombre drama in which day and night, life and death, struggle for the mastery."
All this is something more than that abuse of words—"lyric," "epic," "dramatic"—below which there lurks so often an abuse of reasoning; it is something more than an imaginative will-o'-the-wisp mistaken for the steady light of science; it is nothing less than an inversion of the true order in which the personality of man has been developed. Just as Rousseau's ideal state of nature dissolves into a dream as soon as we recognise
