Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/87

 *torical personage of whom I do not consider that in the long run mankind would have gained immeasurably had he never been born into its midst."

"This is extreme doctrine," said Northcote; "and may I pay you the compliment, sir, of saying that I find you to be one of a greater courage than I had suspected."

"All the so-called 'greatness' one finds enshrined in history," the solicitor continued, "proceeds from an abnormal egotism; and I think even a perfectly commonplace mind such as my own, which is content with the obvious, has only to take a most superficial look around to see that the abnormal is the only evil against which mankind has to contend."

"Necessarily," said Northcote, "since the self-consciousness of matter is the ugliest phenomenon known to natural law. But to follow the line of your reasoning, the abnormal person, whatever the sphere of his activity, is invariably the enemy of his kind?"

"That is my suggestion; the suggestion of an average mind that is content to rest on the plane of matter-of-fact common sense."

"You would say that it would have been better for mankind had the poet Shakespeare never been given to it?"

"Unquestionably. In my view, all poetry, even in what we are pleased to call a sublime and concentrated form, is a direct emanation of morbid sensibility. It stimulates those already sufficiently irritable faculties of the mind which call for a never-ceasing vigilance to hold in check. Poetry