142 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



any positive merits of its own as by the lesson which almost 

 every page of it suggests. To those who have some knowledge 

 of the history of literature, or some experience in life, it is from 

 beginning to end a history of weakness mistaking great desires 

 for great powers. If poetry, in Bacon s noble definition of it, 

 adapt the shows of things to the desires of the mind, senti- 

 mentalism is equally skilful in making realities shape themselves 

 to the cravings of vanity. The theory that the poet is a being 

 above the world and apart from it is true of him as an observer 

 only who applies to the phenomena about him the test of a finer 

 and more spiritual sense. That he is a creature divinely set 

 apart from his fellow-men by a mental organisation that makes 

 them mutually unintelligible to each other, is in flat contradiction 

 with the lives of those poets universally acknowledged as greatest. 

 Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, Milton, Moliere, 

 Goethe in what conceivable sense is it true of them that they 

 wanted the manly qualities which made them equal to the 

 demands of the world in which they lived ? That a poet should 

 assume, as Victor Hugo used to do, that he is a reorganiser of 

 the moral world, and that works cunningly adapted to the popu 

 lar whim of the time form part of some mystericus system which 

 is to give us a new heaven and a new earth, and to remodel 

 laws of art which are as unchangeable as those of astronomy, 

 can do no very great harm to anyone but the author himself, 

 who will thereby be led astray from his proper function, and 

 from the only path to legitimate and lasting success. But when 

 the theory is carried a step further, and we are asked to believe, 

 as in Percival s case, that, because a man can write verses, he is 

 exempt from that inexorable logic of life and circumstances to 

 which all other men are subjected, and to which it is wholesome 

 for them that they should be, then it becomes mischievous, and 

 calls for a protest from all those who have at heart the interests 

 of good morals and healthy literature. It is the theory of idlers 

 and dilettanti, of fribbles in morals and declaimers in verse, 

 which a young man of real power may dally with during some 

 fit of mental indigestion, but which when accepted by a mature 

 man, and carried along with him through life, is a sure mark of 

 feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself. Percival is a 

 good example of a class of authors unhappily too numerous in 

 these latter days. In Europe the natural growth of a world ill 

 at ease with itself and still nervous with the frightful palpita 

 tion of the French Revolution, they are but feeble exotics in our 

 healthier air. Without faith or hope, and deprived of that out- 



