Page:Miscellanies (IA miscellanies00swinrich).pdf/8

vi man can believe in both: for one or the other must needs be a blasphemous liar. And as it is in the highest matters of faith, of hope, and of charity, so is it in matters of opinion, taste, or sympathy. We may heartily appreciate, we may cordially admire, the literary and personal energies of such writers as Byron and Carlyle: but we must recognize that the man who sees a great poet in the histrionic rhapsodist to whom all great poetry was hateful, or a great philosophic and political teacher in the passionate and distempered humourist whose religious ideal was a modified Moloch-worship, and whose political creed found practical expression in the plantations of a slave-owner and the dungeons of a Czar, does rightly or wrongly accept and respect the pretentions of writers who can be acceptable as prophets or respectable as teachers to no man who accepts the traditions of English independence or respects the inheritance of English poetry. On both these points I must confess myself an incurable conservative: I cannot echo the jeer or the lament of Byron, when the finger of his scorn was pointed at Shakespeare or at Milton, and the utterance of his regret for our barbarous violation of rules observed by such superior poets as Alfieri and Voltaire was intensified by the rage of egotism and inflamed by the virulence of envy: I cannot clap or rub my hands with Carlyle over the atrocities inflicted by William of Normandy upon Englishmen or by Nicholas of Russia upon Poles. I am so much a pedant as to prefer Hamlet to Childe Harold, and so much a reactionary as to prefer the teaching of Areopagitica to the teaching of Latterday Pamphlets and I am so narrow-minded a partisan, so short-sighted a sectarian, as to believe a choice between the one creed and the other no less necessary in matters of taste than in matters of principle. From the genius of the eminent writer who chose to make his entry into literary life under the