to
do when you find John Keats an apprentice to a surgeon or apothecary? Is
n't it rather better to get another boy to sweep out the shop and shake
out the powders and stir up the mixtures, and leave him undisturbed to
write his Ode on a Grecian Urn or to a Nightingale? Oh yes, the critic
I have referred to would say, if he is John Keats; but not if he is of
a much lower grade, even though he be genuine, what there is of him. But
the trouble is, the sensitive persons who belong to the lower grades
of the poetical hierarchy do not--know their own poetical limitations,
while they do feel a natural unfitness and disinclination for many
pursuits which young persons of the average balance of faculties take to
pleasantly enough. What is forgotten is this, that every real poet,
even of the humblest grade, is an artist. Now I venture to say that any
painter or sculptor of real genius, though he may do nothing more than
paint flowers and fruit, or carve cameos, is considered a privileged
person. It is recognized perfectly that to get his best work he must
be insured the freedom from disturbances which the creative power
absolutely demands, more absolutely perhaps in these slighter artists
than in the great masters. His nerves must be steady for him to finish a
rose-leaf or the fold of a nymph's drapery in his best manner; and
they will be unsteadied if he has to perform the honest drudgery which
another can do for him quite as well. And it is just so with the poet,
though he were only finishing an epigram; you must no more meddle
roughly with him than you would shake a bottle of Chambertin and expect
the "sunset glow" to redden your glass unclouded. On the other hand,
it may be said that poetry is not an article of prime necessity, and
potatoes are. There is a disposition in many persons just now to deny
the poet his benefit of clergy, and to hold him no better than other
people. Perhaps he is not, perhaps he is not so good, half the time; but
he is a luxury, and if you want him you must pay for him, by not trying
to make a drudge of him while he is all his lifetime struggling with the
chills and heats of his artistic intermittent fever.

There may have been some lesser interruptions during the talk I have
reported as if it was a set speech, but this was the drift of what I
said and should have said if the other man, in the Review I referred to,
had not seen fit to meddle with the subject, as some fellow always does,
just about