the _Aeneid_ in one word as artificial; forgetting, or not seeing, that
the _Aeneid_ was itself the fountain-head of romanticism. Long after the
theory of the noble savage had passed out of political and social
philosophy it lingered in literary criticism; and the distinction between
"natural" and "artificial" poetry was held to be like that between light
and darkness. It was not till a comparatively recent time that the
leisurely progress of criticism stumbled on the fact that all poetry is
artificial, and that the _Iliad_ itself is artificial in a very eminent
and unusual degree.

No great work of art can be usefully judged by comparison with any other
great work of art. It may, indeed, be interesting and fertile to compare
one with another, in order to seize more sharply and appreciate more
vividly the special beauty of each. But to press comparison further, and
to depreciate one because it has not what is the special quality of the
other, is to lose sight of the function of criticism. We shall not find
in Virgil the bright speed, the unexhausted joyfulness, which, in spite
of a view of life as grave as Virgil's own, make the _Iliad_ and
_Odyssey_ unique in poetry; nor, which is more to the point as regards
the _Aeneid,_ the narrative power, the genius for story-telling, which is
one of the rarest of literary gifts, and which Ovid alone among the Latin
poets possessed in any high perfection. We shall not find in him that
high and concentrated passion which in Pindar (as afterwards in Dante)
fuses the elements of thought and language into a single white heat. We
shall not find in him the luminous and untroubled calm, as of a spirit in
which all passion has been fused away, which makes the poetry of
Sophocles so crystalline and irreproachable. Nor shall we find in him the
peculiar beauties of his own Latin predecessors, Lucretius or Catullus.
All this is merely saying in amplified words that Virgil was not
Lucretius or Catullus, and that still less was he Homer, or Pindar, or