Page:On the Sublime 1890.djvu/27

Justice, does little evil, and little good; that is, if to entertain for a moment delicate and curious minds is to do little good.” He does not rate his business so low as that. He admits that the inspiration comes from genius, from nature. But “an author can only learn from art when he is to abandon himself to the direction of his genius.” Nature must “burst out with a kind of fine madness and divine inspiration.” The madness must be fine. How can art aid it to this end? By knowledge of, by sympathy and emulation with, “the great poets and prose writers of the past.” By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From the genius of the past “an effluence breathes upon us.” The writer is not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to keep them as exemplars or ideals. He is to place them as judges of his work. “How would Homer, how would Demosthenes, have been affected by what I have written?” This is practical counsel, and even the most florid modern author, after polishing a paragraph, may tear it up when he has asked himself, “What would Addison have said about this eloquence of mine, or Sainte Beuve, or Mr. Matthew Arnold?” In this way what we call inspiration, that is the performance of the heated mind, perhaps working at its best, perhaps over-