This opens up the question of the frame of mind in which we moderns ought to approach works of “early” art. The first effort of a critic—we must all be agreed about that—should be to put himself, imaginatively, in the artist’s place. He has to try to think himself back into the time, the place, the circumstances of the work, and into the artist’s temperament, intentions, and means of execution. We look at the Madonna of Cimabue in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and our first impulse is to find her ungainly, uncouth, without spiritual significance. It is only by thinking ourselves back among the Florentines of the thirteenth century that we can understand and appreciate Cimabue’s appeal. But consider how difficult—or, rather, impossible—that thinking-back process is. Consider what we have to unlearn. We have to make ourselves as though we had never seen the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; much more than that, we have mentally to wipe out six centuries of human history. Manifestly it cannot be done; we can never see the Cimabue picture as Cimabue himself saw it or as his Florentine contemporaries saw it. We have to try; but what we shall at best succeed in attaining is a palimpsest, the superimposition of new artistic interpretation on the old. And when we say that classics are immortal, we only mean that they are capable of yielding a perpetual series of fresh palimpsests, of being perpetually “hatched again and hatched different.” We cannot see Dante’s _Commedia_ as Dante or Dante’s first readers saw it. For us its politics are dead and its theology grotesque; it lives for us now by its spirituality, its majesty, and the beauty of its form. But with works that are not classics, works that are not susceptible of a perpetual rebirth, the case is even harder. They are inscriptions that we can no longer decipher; we cannot think ourselves, for a moment, back in the mind of the author. They have become for us curios. And that is what Hroswitha’s _Callimachus_ has become: a curio. How can we put ourselves back in the mind of a nun in the Convent of Gandersheim in the age of Otho the Great? I say “we.” For nuns perhaps (having, I assume, a mentality nearer the tenth century than the rest of us) may take a fair shot at it. So, too, may cardinals, whose august mentality I do not presume to fathom. But it is certain that common worldly men, mere average playgoers, cannot do it.