Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/117



has been made of the comfortable and consoling theory held by many optimists that every great work of art possesses an immortal soul which ensures its survival through the ages, and that consequently nothing which has passed from human ken is worth lamenting, since the very fact that it died proves that it was not immortal, and therefore not a masterpiece. Francis W. Halsey, in Our Literary Deluge, stated this theory with much eloquence:

and so on.

Which is just empty rhetoric. Of course one cannot say definitely and finally that anything is lost so long as the world continues to support the human race, for there is always a possibility of finding it. Perhaps another Vermeer may