s in this matter once more exemplified. In the main, as
usual, our reasoning seems to have been quite astray. We have argued as
though for ourselves, and that on those lines we should have reached the
sane conclusion is somewhat surprising. Because, indeed, it does pay _the
world_ to allow genius to do its pleasure: its victims even have little to
complain of; they wear the martyr's crown, and if a few tradesmen or a few
women are the worse, it has been deemed just, time out of mind, that such
should suffer for the people. But the one whom it does not pay, either in
this world or the next, is emphatically the man of genius himself. It is
really on his behalf that the protest against his ancient immunities
should be made, for

'Whether a man serve God or his own whim
Matters not much in the end to any one but Him.'

To take the threadbare instance, the world suffered nothing from the
suicide of Harriet Westbrook: rather it gained by one more story of tragic
pathos. Harriet herself was no loser, for she had lived her dream, and
the stern joy of a great sorrow was granted her to die with: it was only
the selfish heart that could leave her thus to suffer and die that was the
loser. Not in its relations with the world, fair or ill--such, like all
external things, are important only as we take them: but in its diminished
capacity to feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numbness, in its less
noble beat. It was thus that the _cor cordium_ lost what no lyric passion,
no triumphant exultation of success, could give to it again.

However, Shelley and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and
this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic: for great
poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us
that is likely to suffer most from those 'immunities'; still more the
talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the
misguided industry which is neither the one nor the other.

In this lower sphere, it is not murder and sudden death, and other such
volcanic aberrations, that call for condonation; but those offences
against that code of daily intercourse which some faulty observer of human
life has characterised as 'the minor morals.'

The type of 'genius' I am thinking of probably began life by a
misapplication, to himself, of Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance: a great
and beautiful essay, but Oh! how much has it to answer for in the survival
of the un