equally the right and
inheritance of every man he meets, takes up a peculiar dress or
phraseology, as symbols of his fancied difference from his human
brothers. All great poets, till Shelley and Byron, as far as we can
discern, have been men especially free from eccentricities; careful
not merely of the chivalries and the respectabilities, but also of
the courtesies and the petty conventionalities, of the age in which
they lived; altogether well-bred men of the world. The answer, that
they learnt the ways of courts, does not avail; for if they had had
no innate good-breeding, reticence, respect for forms and customs,
they would never have come near courts at all. It is not a question
of rank and fashion, but of good feeling, common sense,
unselfishness. Goethe, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Rabelais,
Ariosto, were none of them high-born men; several of them low-born;
who only rose to the society of high-horn men because they were
themselves innately high-bred, polished, complete, without
exaggerations, affectations, deformities, weaknesses of mind and
taste, whatever may have been their weaknesses on certain points of
morals. The man of all men most bepraised by the present generation
of poets, is perhaps Wolfgang von Goethe. Why is it, then, that of
all men he is the one whom they strive to be most unlike?

And if this be good counsel for the man who merely wishes--and no
blame to him--to sing about beautiful things in a beautiful way, it
applies with tenfold force to the poet who desires honestly to
proclaim great truths. If he has to offend the prejudices of the
world in important things, that is all the more reason for his bowing
to those prejudices in little things, and being content to be like
his neighbours in outward matters, in order that he may make them
like himself in inward ones. Shall such a man dare to hinder his own
message, to drive away the very hearers to whom he believes himself
to be sent, for the sake of his own nerves, laziness, antipathies,
much more of his own vanity and pride? If he does so, he is
unfaithful to that very genius on which he prides himself. He denies
its divinity, by treating it as his own possession, to be displayed
or hidden as he chooses, for his own enjoyment, his own self-
glorification. Well for such a man if a day comes to him in which he
will look back with shame and self-reproach, not merely on every
scandal which he may have caused by breaking the moral and