Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/314

 Because, if the present Public will have nothing to do with you, it is ten to one whether the future will. All our great authors have worked for the public of their own immediate time, without any egotistical calculations as to their possible wider appreciation after death.

The greatest poet in the world, William Shakespeare, was, from all we can gather, an unaffected, cheery, straightforward Warwickshire man, who wrote plays to please the Public who went to the Globe Theatre. He did not say he was too good for the Public; he worked for the Public. He attached so little importance to his own genius, that he made no mention of his work in his will. So we may fairly judge that he never dreamed of the future splendour of his fame—when, three hundred years after his death, every civilized country in the world would have societies founded in his name; when, year after year, new discussions would be opened up concerning his Plays, new actors would be busy working hard to represent his characters, and, strangest compliment of all, when envious persons would turn up to say his work was not his own! For when genius is so varying and brilliant that a certain section of the narrow-*minded cannot understand its many-sided points of view, and will not believe that it is the inheritance of one human brain, then it is great indeed! Three hundred years hence there will, no doubt, be other people to announce to the world that Walter Scott did not write, and could not have written, the Waverley Novels. For they are—in their own special way—as great as the plays of Shakespeare. He, too, was one of those who wrote for the Public.