seventeenth century, a poetry which Pellisson[68] long ago reproached with its want of the true poetic stamp, with its politesse sterile et rampante?[69] but which nevertheless has reigned in France as absolutely as if it had been the perfection of classical poetry indeed.  The dissatisfaction is natural; yet a lively and accomplished critic, M. Charles d’Hericault,[70] the editor of Clement Marot, goes too far when he says that “the cloud of glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history.”  “It hinders,” he goes on, “it hinders us from seeing more than one single point, the culminating and exceptional point, the summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work.  It substitutes a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a man, and hiding from us all trace of the labor, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon us a model.  Above all, for the historian this creation of classic personages is inadmissible; for it withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds criticism by conventional admiration, and renders the investigation of literary origins unacceptable.  It gives us a human personage no longer, but a God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus; and hardly will it be possible for the young student, to whom such work is exhibited at such a distance from him, to believe that it did not issue ready made from that divine head.”

All this is brilliantly and tellingly said, but we must plead for a distinction.  Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classic character.  If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him.  But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character.  This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry.  Everything which interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious.  True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes blinded with superstition; we must perceive when his work comes short, when it drops out of the class of the very best, and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value.  But the use of this negative criticism is not in itself, it is entirely in its enabling us to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is truly excellent.  To trace the labor, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures of a genuine classic, to acquaint oneself with his time and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary