The melancholy part of the situation is that one feels
that these excellent people, for all their admiration, have not learnt
the real lesson of the incident in the least. They would be prepared to
browbeat and contemn originality just as vigorously as their
predecessors. They would speak of a modern Keats as a self-indulgent
dilettante; of a modern Shelley as an immoral Republican. The fact that
the two have stepped silently into Parnassus, receiving nothing but
contempt and neglect from those whose duty it was to encourage them,
does not seem to enlighten the minds of those who are ready enough to
applaud as soon as they find the world applauding. Of course teachers
are in a difficult position. There are always at school and college a
certain number of wild, fantastic, crude young men, who indulge in
unconventional speculations, who have not the genius of Keats and
Shelley in the background, but who share their distaste and disgust for
the conventionality, the tameness, the vulgarity of the world. It is
the duty, no doubt, of people who are responsible for the education of
these young men to try and turn them into respectable citizens,
Sometimes the process is successful; sometimes it is not. Often enough
these visionary, perverse people are misunderstood and shunted till
they make shipwreck of their lives. The path of originality is even
harder than the path of the transgressor, because the stakes for which
the man of genius plays are so tremendous.
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