Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/173

Rh own day. All other kinds degenerate into sentimentalism.

If we have lost the antique zest, the animal happiness, the naïveté of blessed children who Modern ideality: the loss and gain. know not the insufficiency of life, or that they shall love and lose and die, we gain a new potency of art in a sublime seriousness, the heroism that confronts destiny, the faculty of sympathetic consolation, and that "most musical, most melancholy" sadness which conveys a rarer beauty than the gladdest joy,—the sadness of great souls, the art-equivalent of the melancholy of the Preacher, of Lincoln, of Christ himself, who wept often but was rarely seen to smile. The Christian world has added the minor notes to the gamut of poesy. It discovers that if indeed "our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought," it is better to suffer than to lose the power of suffering.

Commonplace objective work, then, is of no worth compared with the frank revelation of an "To thine own self be true." inspiring soul. Our human feeling now seeks for the personality of the singer to whom we yield our heart. Even Goethe breaks out with "Personality is everything in art and poetry;" Schlegel declares that "a man can give nothing to his fellow-man but himself;" and Joubert whom Sainte-Beuve has followed—says, "We must have the man.... It is human warmth and almost human substance which gives to all things that quality which charms us." This fact is a