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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



than any other, is necessary for intellectual prog- 

 ress. We have never a sufficient supply of origi- 

 nality and intellectual daring. We always need 

 more men able to cast aside the traditional spec- 

 tacles, to see for themselves and once more test 

 the dogmas which our indolence tempts us to ac- 

 cept with too easy a faith. Such courage is good, 

 even when misguided. Find men who will dare, 

 and all is possible. Let obedience to authority 

 be installed as the first intellectual virtue, and 

 knowledge will be petrified into Chinese finality. 

 And, if even such eccentricity deserves that con- 

 tempt should be tempered with mercy, may we 

 not rightfully honor many others who have thrown 

 away their lives, like poor Casaubon in " Middle- 

 march," in labors fruitless because accidentally 

 misdirected ? It is a great misfortune, but it is 

 not a vice, to be an anachronism. 



But what are we to say to that great army of 

 martyrs, among whom poor Haydon is to be reck- 

 oned — the epic poets, the rivals of Shakespeare, 

 the would-be eclipsers of Raphael or Phidias — 

 the men whose efforts to sing or to paint have 

 supplied the world with mountains of waste-pa- 

 per, and spoiled acres of good canvas ? One of 

 the most pathetic of Balzac's minor stories de- 

 scribes the fate of a poor- painter, who had la- 

 bored for years at a picture destined to create a 

 new era in art. All his hopes in life, his love 

 and his ambition, were involved in its success. 

 No one had been admitted to the room in which 

 he labored with unremitted devotion. At last, 

 the day came when the favored person stood be- 

 fore the curtain which concealed the masterpiece. 

 The painter drew it aside slowly and solemnly, 

 and revealed a meaningless confusion of chaotic 

 coloring. The artist's mind was of course un- 

 hinged ; but his melancholy story is a symbol of 

 the fate of many men still outside Bedlam. Any 

 one who has seen the darker side of the literary 

 and artistic worlds can match Balzac's hero with 

 numerous instances of similar self-delusion. The 

 pictures are not often mere random blotches of 

 color ; the poems frequently obey the laws of 

 grammar, and even of metre ; but, for all good 

 purposes, the artist might as well have thrown 

 his brush at the canvas, or the author taken his 

 words at random from the dictionary. And what 

 should be our feeling ? Contempt or pity or ad- 

 miration for the devotion, combined with com- 

 passion for the error ? Should we honor, say, a 

 Chatterton who is a martyr to his ambition, be- 

 cause the poems unrecognized during his lifetime 

 turned out really to have something in them 

 (though, after all, not very much !), and despise 



the numerous Chattertons who have hopelessly 

 failed, because there was nothing in them at all ? 

 The moral quality was the same. The difference 

 was, that one man judged his powers rightly, 

 while the hundreds judge of their powers wrongly. 

 But this is an error to which almost every man 

 is liable. Our squarers of the circle are silly, 

 because they can appeal to a court which is prac- 

 tically infallible. A hundred professors of mathe- 

 matics are ready not only to tell them that they 

 are wrong, but to explain to them how and why 

 they are wrong. But the poet can appeal to no 

 such court. If he is not appreciated, it may be 

 that he is in advance, not in rear, of his time. 

 A century hence, his work may be winning recog- 

 nition, and his descendants be ridiculing the 

 blindness of their ancestors. Why, then, should 

 he not persevere, and trust his work to time ? 

 Do we not, in any case, owe to him the tribute 

 of admiration for a devotion of which it is pre- 

 mature to pronounce that it was directed to a 

 mistaken object ? 



The easiest answer is, that a false estimate of 

 our own merits is in fact immoral. Vanity is 

 weakness which we can all condemn unreserved- 

 ly, because we all feel that we are free from it 

 ourselves, and recognize its existence throughout 

 the rest of the species. The appointed chastise- 

 ment of vanity is ridicule. Therefore we are 

 right iti laughing at the man who thinks himself 

 to be a Milton when he is merely a Satan Mont- 

 gomery. The victim may reply that we are beg- 

 ging the question, and that what we call his van- 

 ity will hereafter be called consciousness of genius. 

 And, in truth, the dilemma is in one sense in- 

 soluble. Critics are fallible ; cliques are fallible. 

 The outside public is so fallible as to be gener- 

 ally wrong ; no literary court is infallible except 

 that to which the best minds of all ages are ad- 

 mitted as judges, and in which many of our most 

 dogmatic utterances would look foolish enough. 

 Yet we must take our chance. Judges must sen- 

 tence prisoners, though now and then they may 

 condemn an innocent person. Critics must laugh 

 at charlatans, though they may now and then 

 mistake a man of genius for a fool. But there 

 is a more fundamental difficulty. Granting that 

 a man's confidence in his own powers really im- 

 plies vanity, are we, therefore, justified in con- 

 demning him ? Is vanity a vice at all ? Is it 

 not in any case a vice so universal that none of 

 us have a right to cast the first stone ? Nay, if 

 we lay aside the conventional attitude of mind, 

 in which our little cut-and-dried maxims pass 

 for legitimate currency, ought we not rather to 



