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 everyday 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