I thought that all art should be a
Centaur finding in the popular lore its back and its strong legs.
I got great pleasure too from remembering that Homer was sung, and
from that tale of Dante hearing a common man sing some stanza from
'The Divine Comedy,' and from Don Quixote's meeting with some
common man that sang Ariosto. Morris had never seemed to care for
any poet later than Chaucer; and though I preferred Shakespeare to
Chaucer I begrudged my own preference. Had not Europe shared one
mind and heart, until both mind and heart began to break into
fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth? Music and verse
began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed verse of its speed that he
might give it greater meditation, though for another generation or
so minstrels were to sing his long elaborated 'Troilus and
Cressida;' painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance
that it might study effects of tangibility undisturbed; while,
that it might characterise, where it had once personified, it
renounced, in our own age, all that inherited subject matter which
we have named poetry.
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