In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death.  A universal agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate.  Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed, through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories.  Even the irresistible novelty of personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or in Shakespeare had as good not be.  He is a replica and a shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was never guilty of tautology.  This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality.  Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it.  In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology.  Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the arms of death.  Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art.  Whosoever would make acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends, should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences.  There words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless, scentless, dried weeds, a hortus siccus of proper names, each individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea.  No wind blows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to discompose the melancholy workers at their task of tying Latin labels on to withered sticks.  Definition and division are the watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and creation.  Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no value to the stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a study of anatomy, or an architect by a knowledge of the strains and stresses that may be put on his material.  The exact logical definition is often necessary for the structure of his thought and the ordering of his severer argument.  But often, too, it is the merest beginning; when a word is once defined he overlays it with fresh associations and buries it under new-found moral significances, which may belie the definition they conceal.  This is the burden of Jeremy Bentham’s quarrel with “question-begging appellatives.”  A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as “codification”