It is not merely that the child repeats in his
education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence
must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor
that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the
characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what
is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in
which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and
temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and
Christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative;
it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive.
There has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within
it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the
growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each
reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is
immortal. The substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is
cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a
work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time,
place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so
great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination,
the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture,
like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power
to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of
different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if
the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect.
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