But what man shall dare task another with imprudence?  Who is prudent?  The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom.  There is a certain fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting all our modes of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform.  We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than the rule of human nature?  We do not know the properties of plants and animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; but this remains the dream of poets.  Poetry and prudence should be coincident.  Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code and the day’s work.  But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.  We have violated law upon law until we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are surprised.  Beauty should be the dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare.  Health or sound organization should be universal.  Genius should be the child of genius, and every child should be inspired; but now it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure.  We call partial half lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts,[674] as they are properly called, and not by divine men.  These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it.  Genius is always ascetic; and piety, and love.  Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance.  The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art.  His art rebukes him.  That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had not sowed.  His art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense.  On him who scorned the world, as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge.  He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.  Goethe’s Tasso[676] is very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy.  It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard III.[677] oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other.  One living after the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without submitting to their law.  That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot untie.  Tasso’s is no infrequent case in modern biography.  A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a “discomfortable cousin,” a thorn to himself and to others.