If a writer fails to use the past as the language with which to express his present, the reason may be that he does not know the past, or that he has theoretical objections to using it so, even though the great writers have followed no other method. But this reason is rarely the true one. Today as at other times any sincere writer will be interested in the great examples of his art, and will find them out, and probably the same instincts will eventually show themselves in his work as in the work of his predecessors. Undoubtedly there are poets and novelists today who through a mistaken cult of the natural are striving for a strictly contemporary utterance—rejecting, that is, all that they can recognize in our speech as having a history. If their scholarship were more complete, they would have to reject even the meagre vocabulary of word, image and legend they are now content to use. But the writer who willingly would avail himself of the full inheritance in his art finds himself limited perhaps for another reason—he finds that his readers do not know the past, that many of them cultivate an ignorance of it, and that, therefore, if he uses it to speak with, he may not be understood. It is part of the discipline which every art imposes on those who practise it, that they must speak in terms intelligible to their audience. It remains to ask, of course, who are the audience? and the writer, if he is sufficiently courageous, stubborn, or hopeful, may choose to address a more intelligent audience than he finds in his day, an audience who he thinks will at last recover the traditional tongue in which he speaks, and for whom it will be worth his while to wait. This may seem to some of us the only way out, but we know it is a precarious way. Such a brilliant belated justification came to the Greek classics at the Renaissance; it has come in music to such a giant as Bach, who was, as we say, ahead of his own day; but to expect it to come to us merely because our contemporaries do not appreciate us is entirely too obvious a self-flattery. The sane artist will rather do his best to say what he has to say in language his day understands, and he will try also to encourage his audience in the recovery of a larger language, so that he may say more to them.