Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/206

176 textual embodiment. When finally gathered up from traditions, it owed as much to the compiler as a rude folk-melody owes to a composer who makes it a theme for his sustained work. The judge of such poetry, then, must consider it as both an art and an impulse, and even as addressed to both the eye and the ear. And while it is true that the simplicity of the ancients, of purely objective art, is of the greatest worth, we must remember that the works in question were the product of an age of few "values,"—as Our compensation for its loss. a painter would say. In our passage from the homogeneous to the complex, the loss in simplicity is made up by the gain in variety and richness. We return to simplicity, ever and anon, for repose, and for a new initiative, as a sonata returns to its theme. Refreshed, we advance again, to still richer and more complex inventions. In place of the few Homeric colors we have captured a hundred intermediate shades of the spectrum, and we possess a thousand words to recall these to the imagination. The same progression affects all the arts. What modern painter would be content with the few Pompeian tints; what musician with the five sounds of the classic pentachord?

Artistic simplicity, then, must be attained through The natural key. naturalness; and from that grace of graces modern complexity of material and emotion cannot debar us. If a poet, imitating antique or foreign methods, confines himself baldly to a few "values," he may incur the charge of artifice; and