Men of talent, men of business, touch life upon few sides. They travel
but the beaten path. The creative spirit is not in them. They regard
with suspicion a poet who touches life on every side. They have little
confidence in that divine thing called sympathy, and they do not and
cannot understand the man who enters into the hopes, the aims and the
feelings of all others.
In all genius there is the touch of chaos--a little of the vagabond; and
the successful tradesman, the man who buys and sells, or manages a bank,
does not care to deal with a person who has only poems for collaterals;
they have a little fear of such people, and regard them as the awkward
countryman does a sleight-of-hand performer.
In every age in which books have been produced the governing class, the
respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius. If what are
known as the best people could have had their way, if the pulpit had
been consulted--the provincial moralists--the works of Shakespeare would
have been suppressed. Not a line would have reached our time. And the
same may be said of every dramatist of his age.
If the Scotch Kirk could have decided, nothing would have been known
of Robert Burns. If the good people, the orthodox, could have had their
say, not one line of Voltaire would now be known. All the plates of the
French Encyclopedia would have been destroyed with the thousands that
were destroyed. Nothing would have been known of D'Alembert, Grimm,
Diderot, or any of the Titans who warred against the thrones and altars
and laid the foundation of modern literature not only, but what is of
far greater moment, universal education.
It is not too much to say that every book now held in high esteem would
have been destroyed, if those in authority could have had their will.
Every book of modern times that has a real value, that has enlarged the
intellectual horizon of mankind, that has developed the brain, that has
furnished real food for thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius
of the Papacy, and nearly every one has been commended to the free minds
of men by the denunciations of Protestants.
If the guardians of society, the protectors of "young persons," could
have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley.
The voices that thrill the world would now be silent. If authority could
have had its way, the world would have been as ignorant now as it was
when our ancestors lived in holes or hung from dead limbs by their
prehensile tails.
But we are not forced to go very far back. If Shakespeare had been
published for the first time now, those divine plays--greater than
continents and seas, greater even than the constellations of the
midnight sky--would be excluded from the mails by the decision of the
present enlightened postmaster-general.
The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and that ideal world has
always been far better than the real world. As a consequence, they
have forever roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies--the
enthusiasm of the human race.
The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed--of the
downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved,
and whenever and wherever man has suffered for the right, wherever the
hero has been stricken down--whether on field or scaffold--some man
of genius has walked by his side, and some poet has given form and
expression, not simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations.
From the Greek and Roman world we still hear the voices of a few.
The poets, the philosophers, the artists and the orators still speak.
Countless millions have been covered by the waves of oblivion, but the
few who uttered the elemental truths, who had sympathy for the whole
human race, and who were great enough to prophesy a grander day, are as
alive to-night as when they roused, by their bodily presence, by their
living voices, by their works of art, the enthusiasm of their fellow-men.
Think of the respectable people, of the men of wealth and position,
those who dwelt in mansions, children of success, who went down to
the grave voiceless, and whose names we do not know. Think of the vast
multitudes, the endless processions, that entered the caverns of eternal
night, leaving no thought, no truth as a legacy to mankind!
The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in
all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have
lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.