The selection made by a single race or by a single century is not likely to be widely or permanently acceptable.  Long years ago the Italians were wont to speak of the Four Poets, quattro poete, meaning thereby Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso.  But this was a choice far too local and far too narrow.  Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language he did so much to ennoble,—­altho it may be admitted that the gentle Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other tongues.

Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust ’The Five Indispensable Authors’—­Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere, and Goethe.  “Their universal and perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and insures their immortality.”  We may admit that all five of the authors designated by Lowell are truly indispensable, just as we must accept also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation.  But both Taine’s list and Lowell’s we feel to be too brief.  The French critic had ranged thru every realm of art to discover finally that the incontestable masters were four and four only.  The American critic, altho he limited himself to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not distinguishing between the poets and the masters of prose.

If we strike out of Lowell’s list the single name of Cervantes, who was a poet only in a special and arbitrary sense, we shall have left the names of the four poets whose fame is world-wide—­Homer, Dante, Shakspere, Goethe—­the only poets whose supremacy is admitted thruout our modern civilization.

To these Matthew Arnold insisted on adjoining a fifth, Milton; and we who speak the same tongue would gladly enroll the blind singer with the other four.  Indeed, we might even hold Milton to be securer in this place than Goethe, who has not yet been a hundred years in his grave.  But if we ask the verdict of “the whole group of civilized nations,” which Matthew Arnold himself impaneled as “free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality,” we are met with the doubt whether Milton has established himself among the races that inherit the Latin tradition as securely as Dante has been accepted by the peoples of Teutonic stock.  However high our own appreciation of Milton may be, the cosmopolitan verdict might not include him among the supreme poets.  Indeed, we may doubt whether Vergil might not have more votes than Milton, when the struck jury is polled.

Here, perhaps, we may find our profit in applying a test suggested by Lowell—­the test of imitability.  “No poet of the first class has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable,” whereas “the secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism.”  The greater geniuses may have influenced those who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to the sum of human knowledge; but “they have not infected contemporaries or followers with mannerism.”  Then Lowell points out that “Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression.”