None of our modern States create in us such an impression of being
spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient
world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many
leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them
as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute
this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame.
In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
man was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second time
in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector of
Troy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the
great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types.
How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an
epic.
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