FROM MODERN PAINTERS, VOL. III. CHAPTER XXII. 178 FROM THE ESSAY ON CARDINAL NEWMAN, IN MODERN INTRODUCTION. It is a delicate problem to adjust the relation between independence and a deference to authority. In belles lettres, especially, what seems best to the taste and appreciation of those who are called literary, often fails to please ordinary readers. Subtler phases of thought, heightened style, moods lifted above plain emotions, or plain emotions made great by Wordsworthian simplicity, do not appeal to the majority even of intelligent people. The classics of our poetry and prose are not popular, and where they are read, what to a few appears their best is quite missed by most. These think carelessly, feel bluntly, and are not sensitive to art and beauty. Yet most of them can think and feel, and are in some measure susceptible to æsthetic pleasure. Their difficulty lies in not applying their faculties successfully to literature, or still more, in not taking the trouble to attempt it. Accordingly, they judge inadequately and incorrectly. Well, how far should those who believe that such judgments are partial or mistaken try to impress their own views on the majority-to convert them to their own tastes? Especially in the case of students, is "good taste" to be taught? There is a certain class of refined people who say that it neither can nor need be. They themselves are acquainted with literature because they like it. If others care for it, let them read it. If not, there is no more reason why they should concern them. selves with books than with bacteriology or harmony or lithology, topics which everyone considers it perfectly proper to leave to specialists. Assumed opinions seem to them like eye-glasses and eartrumpets for the incurably blind and deaf. What social adventures are so annoying as to fall in with the critical ineptitudes of pinchbeck culture? Poeta nascitur, non fit; neither can his audience be manufactured. It is to be hoped that this is not the case; at any rate the laissez faire of cultivated exclusiveness is not to be commended. People interested in botany or numismatics, for instance, may well enough be indifferent about popular enthusiasm for such subjects, but there are the clearest reasons why it is unfortunate, more than unfortunate, for intelligent people not to care about belles lettres. Too much profit is lost if they are missed: too much profit, too much pleasure. One of the pathetic aspects of life is that so large a number never come to realize its inner meaning, or their hidden selves. They would stare in perplexity at Browning's entreaty to be "unashamed of soul." They move about in a world not realized, spiritual somnambulists. That self-consciousness by which all operations of brain and heart are vital ized into a new and finer meaning, is shut away from them through their want of sensibility. This is true even of men with brawny intellects that produce results of great practical value, and also of people with a kind of heart which is full of amiable utility. There is a broad difference between what the personal life means even to these, and the enjoyment, the intelligence, the intensity of it all for such as contemplate what they see, and dream out of routine experiences, within and around them, mystery and beauty. De Musset's career as an individual was not a satisfactory one, yet it is impossible to think of it as wholly unenviable when we hear his exclamation, "C'est moi qui ai vécu"-I have lived, I myself. Now, the incomparable excellence of literature, especially in poetry, is that it penetrates beneath the crust of life. Commonplaces are translated, and we find ourselves interested by what we have scarcely noticed. Ideas and sensations are presented through another medium than the matterof-fact. The appeal is made, less to mental than to sympathetic responsiveness. Beauty of various kinds is forced upon the attention, until sensibility becomes more sensitive, and its capacity expands. Not that literature creates any habitual exaltation, or that curiously wrought moods hover over our books. There is nothing especially tangible about this developed way of looking at things, nor is it in the least true that such a result is dependent upon reading. Yet there are multitudes whose finer sense has been quickened, who have taken a more serious |