He not only
personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of
poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed
appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to
educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual
horizon of people of the world.[21] He regards the law of progress as
applicable, in spite of appearances, to poetry and art as much as to
science and politics. The common impression to the contrary he ascribes
solely to the fact, that the perfection of aesthetic creation requires
as its condition a consentaneousness in the feelings of mankind, which
depends for its existence on a fixed and settled state of opinions:
while the last five centuries have been a period not of settling, but of
unsettling and decomposing, the most general beliefs and sentiments of
mankind. The numerous monuments of poetic and artistic genius which the
modern mind has produced even under this great disadvantage, are (he
maintains) sufficient proof what great productions it will be capable
of, when one harmonious vein of sentiment shall once more thrill through
the whole of society, as in the days of Homer, of Aeschylus, of Phidias,
and even of Dante.
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