And
even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or
disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive
because it is not like a sermon. Horce does not say that it is like a
sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had
had the advantage of hearing a sermon. "I have been reading that story
of Troy again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared
for), "quietly at Praeneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly
I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless,
may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's
talk put together."* Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only,
but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are
didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you
shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in
bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly
with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile
that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion
of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only
find by slow mining for it,--which is withheld on purpose, and
close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it
in a furnace of your own heating.
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