134 JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



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 popular whim of the time form 

 part of some mysterious 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 declairners 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 palpitation of the French Revolution, 



