The important point now seems to me to be to uphold, while extending, the idea and belief.  There is no receipt for making classics; this point should be clearly recognised.  To believe that an author will become a classic by imitating certain qualities of purity, moderation, accuracy, and elegance, independently of the style and inspiration, is to believe that after Racine the father there is a place for Racine the son; dull and estimable role, the worst in poetry.  Further, it is hazardous to take too quickly and without opposition the place of a classic in the sight of one’s contemporaries; in that case there is a good chance of not retaining the position with posterity.  Fontanes in his day was regarded by his friends as a pure classic; see how at twenty-five years’ distance his star has set.  How many of these precocious classics are there who do not endure, and who are so only for a while!  We turn round one morning and are surprised not to find them standing behind us.  Madame de Sevigne would wittily say they possessed but an evanescent colour.  With regard to classics, the least expected prove the best and greatest:  seek them rather in the vigorous genius born immortal and flourishing for ever.  Apparently the least classical of the four great poets of the age of Louis Xiv. was Moliere; he was then applauded far more than he was esteemed; men took delight in him without understanding his worth.  After him, La Fontaine seemed the least classical:  observe after two centuries what is the result for both.  Far above Boileau, even above Racine, are they not now unanimously considered to possess in the highest degree the characteristics of an all-embracing morality?

Meanwhile there is no question of sacrificing or depreciating anything.  I believe the temple of taste is to be rebuilt; but its reconstruction is merely a matter of enlargement, so that it may become the home of all noble human beings, of all who have permanently increased the sum of the mind’s delights and possessions.  As for me, who cannot, obviously, in any degree pretend to be the architect or designer of such a temple, I shall confine myself to expressing a few earnest wishes, to submit, as it were, my designs for the edifice.  Above all I should desire not to exclude any one among the worthy, each should be in his place there, from Shakespeare, the freest of creative geniuses, and the greatest of classics without knowing it, to Andrieux, the last of classics in little.  “There is more than one chamber in the mansions of my Father;” that should be as true of the kingdom of the beautiful here below, as of the kingdom of Heaven.  Homer, as always and everywhere, should be first, likest a god; but behind him, like the procession of the three wise kings of the East, would be seen the three great poets, the three Homers, so long ignored by us, who wrote epics for the use of the old peoples of Asia, the poets Valmiki, Vyasa of the Hindoos, and Firdousi of the Persians:  in the domain of