Which of these eminently respectable gentlemen who have brought before the public the necessity of commemorating two great poets are on the lookout for talent of the kind that Keats and Shelley exhibited?  How many of them, if they came across a latter-day young poet, indolent, unconventional, crude, fantastic, would encourage him to be true to his ideas and to work out his own salvation on his own lines?  Which of them, if they had been confronted with our two poets in the flesh, would have encouraged Keats to be Keats and Shelley to be Shelley?  Would they not rather have done their best to inculcate into them their own tamer conceptions of culture and righteousness?

Of course there is something impressive in the posthumous fame of these two men of genius collecting in their wake a crowd of adoring respectabilities, like the people in the German story who touch the magic spear carried by the young hero, and are unable to withdraw their hands, but trot grotesquely behind their conqueror through street and market-place.  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.  It is the applause of a nation, the approbation of connoisseurs, the heart-felt gratitude of idealists if you win; and if you fail, a contemptuous pity for gifts wasted and misapplied.  But one of the reasons why we are so unintellectual, so conventional, so commonplace a nation is because we do not care for ideas, we do not admire originality, we do not want to be made to think and feel; what we admire is success and respectability; and if a poet can so far force himself upon the attention