GENIUS AND VANITY. 



219 



tween his bread-and-butter and his literary am- 

 bition. Which course deserves our approval ? 

 Shall we praise him for daring greatly or for 

 listening to the voice of respectability ? If we 

 prefer the more venturous course, we must, of 

 course, admire the Haydons, and many men with- 

 out Haydon's talent, who have been martyrs to 

 their courage. If not, we prefer Philistia to 

 Bohemia, and sympathize with the numerous 

 parents who have condemned Pegasus to har- 

 ness. There are, it is to be observed, two dis- 

 tinct problems : First, we may ask whether it is 

 better to pay your bills or to produce a "Hamlet ? " 

 Secondly, as nobody can be certain that his work 

 is really a " Hamlet," we must ask whether it is 

 better to pay, or to take the chance of producing 

 what may possibly turn out to be a " Hamlet ? " 



Most people will answer the first question 

 with little hesitation. Better, they will say, that 

 Shakespeare's butchers, bakers, and landlady, 

 should have gone unpaid, though want of pay- 

 ment had meant starvation ; better that the debt 

 should have gone on accumulating at compound 

 interest from that day to the present, than that 

 " Hamlet " should have been burked. What would 

 be the loss of a few tradesmen compared to the 

 loss of one of the few imperishable monuments of 

 human genius ? The two things are not com- 

 parable. A man who could pronounce against 

 " Hamlet " would be capable of breaking up West- 

 minster Abbey to mend the Thames Embank- 

 ment. But is this so very clear ? Are we per- 

 fectly certain that our valuation is just ? Assum- 

 ing that " Hamlet" deserves all the praises it has 

 received from Shakespeare's most slavish idola- 

 ters, I confess that I should still have certain 

 twinges of doubt. What, after all, is the worth 

 of any creation of human genius ? What is the 

 proportion between the value of a work of art 

 and the artist's ordinary discharge of his daily 

 duties ? What — for that seems to be the real 

 question — is the value to the world of its greatest 

 men ? What is the value of a Shakespeare, as 

 measured against the value of an honest grocer ? 



We cannot adjust the proportion to a nicety, 

 nor even with approximate accuracy. The right 

 point would doubtless lie somewhere between the 

 extravagance of the hero-worshiper and the dep- 

 recatory view of that kind of spiritual democ- 

 racy which holds that the individual is nothing 

 and the multitude everything. But it is equally 

 clear that the average opinion has been hitherto 

 deflected from the true line by the enthusiast far 

 more than by the cynic. The more we know, the 

 more clearly we realize the vastness of the debt 



which even the greatest owe to their obscure 

 contemporaries. Every advance of criticism di- 

 minishes the share of glory due to the great man, 

 and increases the merit of his corporators. His- 

 tory sees everywhere, not the work of a solitary 

 legislator, but processes implying the slow growtli 

 of many generations. The scattered stars of the 

 firmament are but bright points in vast nebula} 

 revealed by closer observation. In art, the im- 

 portance of the social medium, relatively to the 

 single performer, assumes ever greater propor- 

 tions. But what is this but to diminish the ex- 

 travagant value attributed to single perform- 

 ances ? Their intrinsic excellence may not be 

 lessened, but we must lower our estimate of their 

 importance as self-originated and creative forces. 

 " Hamlet " may be incomparably superior to " The 

 Maid's Tragedy " or " The Duchess of Malfi ;" but 

 we must admit that Shakespeare was but a co- 

 operator with Fletcher and Webster. The gen- 

 eral character of the period would not have been 

 greatly altered had Shakespeare died of the 

 measles ; though it would have left behind it a 

 less superlative relic. The disregard of the 

 second-rate performers has fallen in with the 

 tendency to adulate success. What passes for 

 criticism of great men has become a mere com- 

 petition in extravagance. Each man tries to 

 raise a loftier cloud of incense, and grovel more 

 profoundly in the dust. He wins a cheap praise 

 of generosity and generality by tacitly depressing 

 the mass, in order to give a more imposing air to 

 the pinnacle on which he erects his solitary hero- 

 Without speaking, however, of those mon- 

 strous accumulations of hyperbolic panegyrics 

 which form the monuments of our great men, we 

 should rather alter our view of the importance 

 than of the excellence of the supreme poets and 

 thinkers. Let them tower above their fellows as 

 much as you please. Say, if you will, that the 

 powers implied by the greatest achievements are 

 different in kind, as well as degree, from those 

 possessed by their humbler brethren. Still it 

 will remain true, first, that the greatest of men 

 is but the organ through which thoughts and feel- 

 ings common to thousands and millions of his 

 fellows find their fullest expression. He is not 

 an isolated phenomenon dropped into the world 

 from without, but the finest of flowers, which ap- 

 pears when the soil and the atmosphere are fully 

 prepared for his development. Cut the flower 

 down, and it could not be replaced ; but its disap- 

 pearance would have but a minor influence upon 

 the conditions to which it was due. The same 

 conceptions of the world and of man's place in it 



