GENIUS AND VANITY, 



217 



often blunder. The sanguine observer will differ 

 from the melancholy ; the man of quick sympa- 

 thies will be more apt to be affected for good or 

 evil by his neighbor's judgment than the man 

 whose affections may be stronger though less 

 mobile ; the excitable man will be led into one 

 extreme or the other more easily than the phleg- 

 matic ; a vivid imagination predisposes us to ac- 

 cept a set of tests different from that which would 

 commend itself to the severe logician ; and ; 

 moreover, a man's judgment of his own charac- 

 ter will vary from day to day, like his judgment 

 of all other matters, according to the state of his 

 liver or his banker's balance. All these — and 

 many other — difficulties are so inevitable that we 

 must look with compassion upon a wrong esti- 

 mate so long as it is not palpably due to some 

 irrelevant cause. Only when a man is vain for 

 some bad reason — because he has a longer purse 

 or a more uncommon disease than his neighbors 

 — and cases of far more eccentric judgment are 

 not uncommon — he is admitting evidence which 

 he clearly ought to have excluded. The errors 

 of the judge in this case imply not only fallibility 

 but corruption ; he has taken a bribe from some 

 of his passions, and he deserves some of the in- 

 dignation due to such unworthy leanings. 



I am, you say, capable of being a great poet ; 

 my talents shall not be lost to the w r orld ; I will 

 brave poverty, anxiety, contempt; my fellow- 

 creatures may repent their indifference, and ren- 

 der a tardy homage over my grave or to my de- 

 clining years. Brave words ! but words as easy 

 to the fool, the knave, and the charlatan, as to 

 the neglected martyr of the race. Is your first 

 judgment beyond all suspicion — not only of error 

 but of sincerity? Are you not biased by some 

 baser motive when you pronounce yourself to be 

 one of the elect ? If you really hold that your 

 wretched dribble of mechanical metre is equal to 

 the mighty harmony of a Milton, you must be 

 wanting in ear for the music of verse; if you 

 take your tinsel-decked platitudes for the passion- 

 ate utterance of a great intellect, stirred to its 

 depth by the sadness of the world's tragedies, 

 you are probably deficient in philosophical in- 

 sight ; if you cannot see the difference between 

 your conception of the world as a gigantic pot- 

 house, or a magnified stock-exchange, and that 

 which represents in their full force the purifying 

 and ennobling passions, it is probable that there 

 is a gap or two in your morality. Making all al- 

 lowances for the difficulty of self-judgment, there 

 remains a strong presumption that the man who 

 takes a daub — even a daub of his own manufact- 



ure — for a true masterpiece is deficient in the 

 power of sharing as well as in the power of ut- 

 tering the loftiest thoughts. You cannot put col- 

 ors on canvas because you cannot see them in 

 Nature. Your artistic standard is low because 

 you are incapable of the high emotions which it 

 is the true function of the best art to express, 

 and the full utterance of which is the one true 

 test of artistic excellence. You appeal to vulgar 

 tastes because you are wanting in innate refine- 

 ment. It is due to other bad qualities if you 

 take size for sublimity, contortion for force, in- 

 tricacy for subtilty; if brutality appears to you 

 to be strength of feeling, and sensuality to be 

 masculine vigor. If you succeed, you are a char- 

 latan ; and, if you fail, your failure is deserved. 

 Your vanity is the index, not of the inevitable 

 illusion of self-contemplation, but of a mean, or 

 narrow, or degraded nature. 



Such a verdict would be inevitable, if the 

 power of representing were always proportioned 

 to the power of feeling emotions ; if productivity 

 and receptivity were but opposite forms of the 

 same power. Notoriously this is not the case. 

 Silence may sometimes indicate a defect of the 

 organs of speech, not an absence of though^ 

 Many a man enjoys Nature heartily who cannot 

 put together two lines of description ; and yet 

 he may fancy himself to be eloquent, because he 

 naturally infers that the clumsy phrases which 

 express his own sentiment must express the sen- 

 timents of others. Moliere's old woman is a 

 typical case. Thousands can enjoy for one who 

 can create, or even assign intelligible reasons for 

 his judgment. Unluckily, many such old women 

 fancy that their appreciation of their Moliere en- 

 titles them to write comedies. The weakness is 

 an amiable one. We ought to pity those poor 

 dumb poets who have music in their souls, and 

 strive in vain to embody it in artistic shape. So 

 long as they do not insist upon our reading their 

 verses, we will tolerate and even love them. Sin- 

 cere devotion to art is perhaps most touching in 

 those to whom art never makes any return of 

 praise and success. But it is the more necessary 

 to distinguish clearly between these victims of an 

 innocent delusion and those whose delusion im- 

 plies incapacity, not only to produce but to enjoy. 

 One class worships at the true shrine, though its 

 offerings are poor ; the other grovels before an 

 ugly idol, because it is dead to the true instinct 

 of veneration, and admires the reflection of its 

 own base passions. 



How shall we tell whether the vanity of an 

 artist be of the noxious or innocent kind ? The 



