But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an element alone.  By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function in devising new and fantastic republics.  But imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization.  The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves.  Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with the eyes of a Euphuist.  The prime function of imagination is to see our whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions.  In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.  To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book blazes with blasphemy.

Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal.  But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised.  This Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm.  To study it is like fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man.  To us its flowers seem as tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd’s pipe seem to dance with all the artificiality of a ballet.  Even our own prosaic toil seems to us more joyous than that holiday.  Where its ancient exuberance passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze.  In those gray old pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon.  Their very sins seem colder than our restraints.

All this may be frankly recognised:  all the barren sentimentality of the Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism.  But when all is said and done, something else remains.

Through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour.  It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor.  It was good for him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below him.  It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than his triumphs, the conception that ‘there remaineth a rest.’