188 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 



not so much from 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 litera- 

 ture, 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," 

 sentimentalism 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 spirit- 

 ual sense. That he is a creature divinely set apart from 

 his fellow-men by a mental organization that makes 

 them mutually unintelligible to each other, is in flat 

 contradiction with the lives of those poets universally 

 acknowledged as greatest. Dante, Shakespeare, Cer- 

 vantes, 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 1 That a poet 

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

 reorganizer 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 any one 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 inexora- 

 ble logic of life and circumstance to which all other men 

 are subjected, and to which it is wholesome for them 



