46.  Then, secondly, the creed of the upper classes was more refined and spiritual, but quite as honest, and even more forcible in its effect on the life.  You might imagine that the employment of the artifice just referred to implied utter unbelief in the persons contriving it; but it really meant only that the more worldly of them would play with a popular faith of their own purposes, as doubly-minded persons have often done since, all the while sincerely holding the same ideas themselves in a more abstract form; while the good and unworldly men, the true Greek heroes, lived by their faith as firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, or the Chevalier Bayard.

47.  Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets and artists was, necessarily, less definite, being continually modified by the involuntary action of their own fancies; and by the necessity of presenting, in clear verbal or material form, things of which they had no authoritative knowledge.  Their faith was, in some respects like Dante’s or Milton’s:  firm in general conception, but not able to vouch for every detail in the forms they gave it; but they went considerably farther, even in that minor sincerity, than subsequent poets; and strove with all their might to be as near the truth as they could.  Pindar says, quite simply, “I cannot think so-and-so of the gods.  It must have been this way—­it cannot have been that way—­that the thing was done.”  And as late among the Latins as the days of Horace, this sincerity remains.  Horace is just as true and simple in his religion as Wordsworth; but all power of understanding any of the honest classic poets has been taken away from most English gentlemen by the mechanical drill in verse-writing at school.  Throughout the whole of their lives afterwards, they never can get themselves quit of the notion that all verses were written as an exercise, and that Minerva was only a convenient word for the last of a hexameter, and Jupiter for the last but one.

48.  It is impossible that any notion can be more fallacious or more misleading in its consequences.  All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.  With deliberate didactic purpose the tragedians—­with pure and native passion the lyrists —­fitted their perfect words to their dearest faiths.  “Operosa parvus carmina fingo.”  “I, little thing that I am, weave my laborious songs” as earnestly as the bee among the bells of thyme on the Matin mountains.  Yes, and he dedicates his favorite pine to Diana, and he chants his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guards his fields, and he guides the noble youth and maids of Rome in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer’s little girl that the gods will love her, though she has only a handful of salt and meal to give them—­just as earnestly as ever English gentleman taught Christian faith to English youth in England’s truest days.