At least, says again the lover of current things, you must write in the language of the hour. Some beauty is lost when the poet does not speak in his native tongue, or when we cannot read him in it. Well, some languages are better than others; Greek was a better language, more precise, more varied, more forceful and more colorful, than English or any of the modern tongues. But all language changes, as the works of art in language do not; in literature we have this haunting paradox, that through a temporary medium we can build something imperishable. Much as we may dislike literature in translation, it is perhaps salutary to remember that literary masterpieces must survive in translation or not at all. In what language were the parables spoken? If Homer were not Homer still in English or French or German, how much of Homer would the world know? Some bouquet of his own time is gone, but perhaps we should not have liked it if it had remained. At least we have kept what we liked; we have kept what suited our spiritual needs, we have loved Andromache and Hector, and wondered in the old way why such fine men as Achilles and Agamemnon should quarrel, and have decided, as all our fathers have done, that for so beautiful a woman as Helen to waste her time on so mean a fellow as Paris, there must have been queer influences at work. To live in art in this timeless way, is to satisfy what is eternal in ourselves; it is to leave behind us the limitations of our hour, our place, and our language. And unless art is wide enough for us to live in it so, we shall trifle with it only for an hour, and without regret let it go the way of other contemporary things.
Our impulse might be to say that any character at all is proper to literature, or to any phase of literature, for we have long ago discarded that convention of ancient story which introduced the hero and heroine always as nobly born, or if at first they were not gentlefolk, yet in the last chapter they were shown to be prince and princess in disguise. Our leading characters now may have whatever origin God wills; the author does not interfere. No longer do we reserve the peasant, the poor or the ignorant for the foot of our list of _dramatis personæ_, nor do we smuggle them into the scene at resting moments, for comic relief. Since human nature is the subject of art, and since the Almighty (we quote Lincoln for this) showed us where to put the emphasis in human nature, by creating common folk in the vast majority, we have even followed the example with an excess of enthusiasm, until the elect are pretty well put down from their former seat in literature, and in their stead are the socially humble and the mentally weak. For a hundred years or more we have been pressing this charitable revolution. Wordsworth, though not the first to try it, first won a considerable hearing in English poetry for the beggar, the pedlar, the afflicted, the half-witted—a hearing for them, that is, as central figures in the poems where they occur; and shortly afterwards the novelists, on the irresistible tide of humanitarianism, invited not only our attention but our admiration for persons who hitherto had seemed obscure and unfortunate. Dickens perhaps went too far, we now feel; he demonstrated the weakness of the gentry, and sent them to the background of the story, where we are willing enough they should remain, but he also tried to endow the lower classes with so much delicacy, tact, and spirit that his leading persons seem to be gentry still, masquerading in a temporary eclipse of fortune, like the lost prince and princess of the fairy tale. But he taught us how to carry on his unfinished revolution; since he stripped sentimentality, all that sort of nonsense, from the gentry, we have known at last how to strip it from the bourgeois. Some of our novelists riddle the polite world for us, others tell us the unflinching truth about our middle classes. We have no heroes; any character can get into our literature, if we may use him as a target rather than worship him as a god.