This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour and self-respect, is unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand by intimacy mutual concession to a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal with masks, that when they see a face they are shocked as by some grotesque.Now a poet, like Montaigne's naked philosopher, is all face; and the bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics is the greater.Wherever he attracts general attention he cannot but be misunderstood.The generality of modern men and women who pretend to literature are not hypocrites, or they might go near to divine him, - for hypocrisy, though rooted in cowardice, demands for its flourishing a clear intellectual atmosphere, a definite aim, and a certain detachment of the directing mind.But they are habituated to trim themselves by the cloudy mirror of opinion, and will mince and temporise, as if for an invisible audience, even in their bedrooms.Their masks have, for the most part, grown to their faces, so that, except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it is hardly themselves that they express.The apparition of a poet disquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, and apologises to no idols.His candour frightens them: they avert their eyes from it; or they treat it as a licensed whim; or, with a sudden gleam of insight, and apprehension of what this means for them and theirs, they scream aloud for fear.A modern instance may be found in the angry protestations launched against Rossetti's Sonnets, at the time of their first appearance, by a writer who has since matched himself very exactly with an audience of his own kind.A stranger freak of burgess criticism is every-day fare in the odd world peopled by the biographers of Robert Burns.The nature of Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it could hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors out of three would call him brother.But he lit up the whole of that nature by his marvellous genius for expression, and grave personages have been occupied ever since in discussing the dualism of his character, and professing to find some dark mystery in the existence of this, that, or the other trait - a love of pleasure, a hatred of shams, a deep sense of religion.It is common human nature, after all, that is the mystery, but they seem never to have met with it, and treat it as if it were the poet's eccentricity.They are all agog to worship him, and when they have made an image of him in their own likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactly hits their taste, they break into noisy lamentation over the discovery that the original was human, and had feet of clay.They deem "Mary in Heaven" so admirable that they could find it in their hearts to regret that she was ever on earth.This sort of admirers constantly refuses to bear a part in any human relationship; they ask to be fawned on, or trodden on, by the poet while he is in life; when he is dead they make of him a candidate for godship, and heckle him.It is a misfortune not wholly without its compensations that most great poets are dead before they are popular.
If great and original literary artists - here grouped together under the title of poets - will not enter into transactions with their audience, there is no lack of authors who will.These are not necessarily charlatans; they may have by nature a ready sympathy with the grossness of the public taste, and thus take pleasure in studying to gratify it.But man loses not a little of himself in crowds, and some degradation there must be where the one adapts himself to the many.The British public is not seen at its best when it is enjoying a holiday in a foreign country, nor when it is making excursions into the realm of imaginative literature:
those who cater for it in these matters must either study its tastes or share them.Many readers bring the worst of themselves to a novel; they want lazy relaxation, or support for their nonsense, or escape from their creditors, or a free field for emotions that they dare not indulge in life.The reward of an author who meets them half-way in these respects, who neither puzzles nor distresses them, who asks nothing from them, but compliments them on their great possessions and sends them away rejoicing, is a full measure of acceptance, and editions unto seventy times seven.
The evils caused by the influence of the audience on the writer are many.First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic vices of the charlatan - to wit, sheer timidity and weakness.There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces.This is the true panic fear, that walks at mid-day, and unmans those whom it visits.Hence come reservations, qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering courage, which apes progress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with their feet.The writing produced under these auspices is of no greater moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient.All self-expression is a challenge thrown down to the world, to be taken up by whoso will; and the spirit of timidity, when it touches a man, suborns him with the reminder that he holds his life and goods by the sufferance of his fellows.Thereupon he begins to doubt whether it is worth while to court a verdict of so grave possibilities, or to risk offending a judge - whose customary geniality is merely the outcome of a fixed habit of inattention.
