VIRGIL  233

single  century  Childe  Harold  has  quickly  passed
fro^  its  original  warmth  of  true  popular  appeal  to
the  chilly  recesses  of  literary  history;  and  in  the
course  of  twenty  centuries  such  artificial  conven-
tions as  those  of  pastoral  poetry  and  such  primal
devices  as  would  set  forth  didactic  purpose  in  poetic
terms  have  mostly  meant  little  to  human  beings,  as
distinguished  from  scholars,  fantastics,  or  pedants.
We  can  study  them,  we  can  admire  them  as  much
as  we  choose;  but  without  considerable  effort  of
historical  imagination  we  cannot  sympathetically
understand  how  anybody  could  ever  have  enthu-
siastically enjoyed  them.  So,  if  Virgil*s  work  had
stopped  here,  he  would  have  remained  a  beauti-
fully sincere  celebrant  of  Italy  and  of  the  imperial
policies  of  Julius  and  Augustus  Caesar;  he  would
have  proved  himself,  too,  the  faultless  master  of
Latin  style  who  could  at  last  make  the  studied
grace  of  Latin  hexameters  rival  by  reason  of  its
very  differences  the  vigour  and  splendour  of  the
primal  Greek.  Thus  his  place  in  European  litera-
ture would  have  been  secure;  but  it  could  never
have  been  thought  comparable  with  that  of  Homer,
or  of  the  tragic  poets  of  Fifth  Century  Athens.
Eminence  like  theirs  belongs  only  to  the  few  who
can  tell,  epically  or  dramatically,  what  seems  to
"that  willing  suspension  of  disbelief  for  the  mo-
ment which  constitutes  poetic  faith,"  ^  a  genuine
human  story.  How  true  this  is  anybody  can  re-
mind himself  by  merely  thinking  of  Virgil  now.
Everybody  knows,  in  a  general  way,  that  he  wrote
the  Bucolics  and  the  Georgics;  but  everybody
remembers  first  that  he  wrote  the  ^neid.
If  we  may  trust  the  accepted  story,  this  last  of
his  works  has  survived  against  his  expressed  will.
