To turn to England again:  Tennyson was, generally speaking, most successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher; because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet of Mid-Victorian England.  Carlyle, who was a far greater poet essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew it also.  In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.  They are called realists because they work on the plane which has come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair.  Such men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the Soul;—­its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality; and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;—­its temporary blindness, not its essential glory.  But the true business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to England; and though she did not touch the field of creative literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it.  She was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and, curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or when his century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to exchange even for the light of Aeschylus.  If one of the two were about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should be, we should have to cry, Take Aeschylus, but leave us this! —­Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!—­But to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter in a small way of business; his mother a midwife.  He himself began life as a sculptor,—­a calling, in its lower reaches, not so far above that of his father.  A group of the Graces carved by him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias.  But, successful or not, he seems soon to have given it up.  Of his youth we know very little.  Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of terrible passions:  anger hardly to be governed, and vehement desires; “though,” he added, “he never did anything unfair.” * By ‘unfair’ you may understand ’not fitting’—­a transgression of right action.  He set out to master himself:  a tremendous and difficult realm to master.