At the same time, our national capacity for reaching right conclusions by the wrong course is in this matter once more exemplified.  In the main, as usual, our reasoning seems to have been quite astray.  We have argued as though for ourselves, and that on those lines we should have reached the sane conclusion is somewhat surprising.  Because, indeed, it does pay the world to allow genius to do its pleasure:  its victims even have little to complain of; they wear the martyr’s crown, and if a few tradesmen or a few women are the worse, it has been deemed just, time out of mind, that such should suffer for the people.  But the one whom it does not pay, either in this world or the next, is emphatically the man of genius himself.  It is really on his behalf that the protest against his ancient immunities should be made, for

    ’Whether a man serve God or his own whim
    Matters not much in the end to any one but Him.’

To take the threadbare instance, the world suffered nothing from the suicide of Harriet Westbrook:  rather it gained by one more story of tragic pathos.  Harriet herself was no loser, for she had lived her dream, and the stern joy of a great sorrow was granted her to die with:  it was only the selfish heart that could leave her thus to suffer and die that was the loser.  Not in its relations with the world, fair or ill—­such, like all external things, are important only as we take them:  but in its diminished capacity to feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numbness, in its less noble beat.  It was thus that the cor cordium lost what no lyric passion, no triumphant exultation of success, could give to it again.

However, Shelley and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic:  for great poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us that is likely to suffer most from those ‘immunities’; still more the talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the misguided industry which is neither the one nor the other.

In this lower sphere, it is not murder and sudden death, and other such volcanic aberrations, that call for condonation; but those offences against that code of daily intercourse which some faulty observer of human life has characterised as ‘the minor morals.’

The type of ‘genius’ I am thinking of probably began life by a misapplication, to himself, of Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance:  a great and beautiful essay, but Oh! how much has it to answer for in the survival of the unfittest.  Alas! that the wheat and tares must grow together till the harvest.  It is the syrup of phosphorus by which weakly mediocrity develops into sturdiness, a sturdy coarseness that else might have died down and been spared us.  But, thanks to that or some other artificial fertiliser, it grows up with the idea that the duty which lies nearest to it is to write weary books, paint monotonous