GENIUS AND VANITY. 



221 



bears its perfect fruit. The Shakespeare is not 

 merely the man of greater power than his neigh- 

 bors, but that particular man of great powers who 

 appeared when the times were ripe and circum- 

 stances propitious. To stake your happiness on 

 the chance that you are an exceptional being 

 under exceptional circumstances is, to say the 

 least, daring to the verge of rashness. But, if I 

 do not, the world will lose its chance of another 

 great poet ! Make yourself easy ; the world will 

 get on perfectly well. Nobody is so great in 

 politics, but that society could struggle along its 

 path of development without him ; nor so great 

 in song, but that somehow the emotions of the 

 world will find some channel of utterance. 

 Death — to our ignorance at least — is like a dark 

 po^Yer stalking through the world, striking left 

 and right at random, crushing the happy and 

 leaving the miserable, and destroying the genius 

 as well as the fool. But his blow never strikes 

 an individual with whom we could not dispense. 

 Thought will continue to push along every line of 

 development. The disappearance of one inquirer 

 only transfers to another the discoveries which 

 are held to confer immortality ; the social prob- 

 lem is being worked out by unconsciously co- 

 operating millions, and they will find a leader to 

 replace the old one ; if one man is removed, pos- 

 terity will have to inscribe the name of the im- 

 mortal Jones in its pantheon instead of honoring 

 the immortal Smith ; the problem may be solved 

 a day later or a day sooner, and there may be 

 some differences in the terms of the answer ; but 

 the answer will be found, and must be the same 

 in essence. The great man puts the clock on ; 

 he does not determine the direction of its move- 

 ment. And it is equally true that when thoughts 

 are fermenting in the mind of age, and new as- 

 pects of Nature become conspicuous, and now 

 emotional phases diminish utterance, people will 

 be found to provide the imaginative symbols 

 fitted for the embodiment ; and the man who 

 does at last will be regarded as the creator in- 

 stead of the product. At any rate, it is quite 

 needless for any man to fret himself about the 

 fate of the universe. There are within this realm 

 five hundred, probably five thousand, as good as 

 he, and those will do best who leave the world 

 and their fame to take their chance, and aim only 

 at doing the work which lies next to hand. 



Leave the universe alone. When a regard 

 for the interest of things in general is not hyp- 

 ocritical, it is the very madness of arrogance. 

 Here, as in so many cases, it is the law, though 

 it is an apparent paradox, that a man contributes 



to an end most effectually by putting any direct 

 reference to the end out of his mind. Here, in- 

 deed, is a plainer, if not more powerful, consid- 

 eration. Is not the supposed act of heroism a 

 folly in any case ? It requires courage to neglect 

 one's bread-and-butter in order to to win glory ; 

 but what if the neglect of bread-and-butter be the 

 shortest way to wreck your genius as well as your 

 prospects ? Good work, as a rule, is only done 

 by people who have paid their bills. Why was 

 Shakespeare so far ahead of all contemporary 

 dramatists ? Because Shakespeare had the good 

 sense to make money, and was therefore able to 

 command the market, and write his later works 

 without undue pressure. Others could only write 

 in a tavern, or to get out of a creditor's clutches. 

 Shakespeare's mind was at ease by the conscious- 

 ness of his comfortable investments at Stratford. 

 "Hamlet" was written because Shakespeare was 

 solvent. Pope was able to polish his verses 

 because he judiciously made himself indepen- 

 dent by his " Homer." Wordsworth, like Haydon, 

 wished to shake the world ; but, unlike Haydon, he 

 recognized and acted upon the truth that the 

 first condition of such power is personal inde- 

 pendence. Live for art, if you will ; but first be 

 sure that you have not to live by your art, other- 

 wise the only harvest that you can reap will be 

 that of the first reckless ebullitions, when the 

 responsibility of life does not weigh upon the 

 buoyancy of youth. Some good work has come 

 out of Bohemia ; but any one who sojourns per- 

 manently in that seductive region is sure to lose 

 his vigor as well as his money, and produces in 

 the end mere scraps and outlines and rough indi- 

 cations of what he might have done. When we 

 are asked to consider how much may have been 

 crushed in poets condemned to writing ledgers, 

 we can only reply by pointing out how much has 

 certainly been lost by poets who have run to 

 seed in sponging-houses. From the days of Mar- 

 lowe to those of the unhappy Edgar Toe, we 

 have innumerable warnings that genius runs to 

 waste when it does not condescend to be re- 

 spectable. 



We have fallen upon a very commonplace 

 and humble moral. It is none the worse for 

 that, and certainly not the less often overlooked. 

 The truth which it is really important to enforce 

 more than ever is the simple one that all really 

 good and permanent work is the expression, not 

 of a single mood of passionate excitement or 

 prurient desire for enjoyment, but of a mind 

 fully developed, strengthened by conflict with 

 the world, and enriched by reflection and ex- 



