No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,--that is not representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to illustrate the character of the age,--to be of a piece with other expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. It must be one note in the concert, and that not discordant,--neither behind time nor ahead of it,--neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don't want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. All greatness consists in this: in being alive to what is going on around one; in living actually; in giving voice to the thought of humanity; in saying to one's fellows what they want to hear or need to hear at that moment; in being the concretion, the result, of the influences of the present world. In no other way can one affect the world than in responding thus to its needs, in embodying thus its ideas. You will see, in looking to history, that all great men have been a piece of their time; take them out and set them elsewhere, they will not fit so well; they were made for their day and generation. The literature which has left any mark, which has been worthy of the name, has always mirrored what was doing around it; not necessarily daguerreotyping the mere outside, but at least reflecting the inside,--the thoughts, if not the actions of men,--their feelings and sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too, will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no such Catholicism to inspire the builders; the very men who reared them would not be architects, if they lived to-day. And the Italian painters,