We call ourselves Christians, and we crucify the
Christ-like spirit of simplicity and liberty. But let us at least make
up our minds as to what we desire, and not try to arrive at a
disgusting compromise. Our way is to persecute genius living and to
crown it dead. Can we not make a sincere attempt to recognise it when
it is among us, to look out for it, to encourage it, instead of acting
in the spirit of Pickwickian caution, and when there are two mobs, to
shout with the largest?
LI
I have been reading the Memoir of J.H. Shorthouse, and it has been a
great mystery to me. It is an essentially commonplace kind of life that
is there revealed. He was a well-to-do manufacturer--of vitriol, too,
of all the incongruous things. He belonged to a cultivated suburban
circle, that soil where the dullest literary flowers grow and flourish.
He lived in a villa with small grounds; he went off to his business in
the morning, and returned in the afternoon to a high tea. In the
evening he wrote and read aloud. The only thing that made him different
from other men was that he had the fear of epileptic attacks for ever
hanging over him; and further, he was unfitted for society owing to a
very painful and violent stammer. I saw him twice in my life; remote
impressions of people seen for a single evening are often highly
inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth.
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