Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/124

Rh are these distractions that perhaps not more than half-a-dozen men in a generation continue to form their taste through many years together.

The probability of this will appear if we roughly sketch the accidents which deter us from persevering, even though we leave out of sight all those which deprive taste of opportunity, and indicate merely such as induce bad habits of mind.

Many readers, supposing them to have set out unprejudiced, may soon be committed to praise or blame, and then prove reluctant to revise and reject those so confident judgments. This unwillingness to renounce infallibility already seduces their minds to continue a higher strain of praise or a more rigorous blame than now appears due; and such disloyalty spreading will even blight the roots of admiration.

More modest souls are, on the contrary all ears for others' opinions; yet the very openness of their minds may let in such a crowd of contradictory voices that in the din and confusion their own poor reason, unable to hold its own, by degrees acquiesces in silence.

Some, again, read verse so quickly or in such quantities that energy fails them for searching, sifting and listening to their genuine impressions with ardour and thoroughness: while others will desist from effort through mere indolence, and so making fewer and fewer discoveries of excellence, will gradually take less interest in poetry, till they no longer find it worth while to read any.

Then there are those who conclude that great poets produce nothing but great poetry, and drown their taste in forced admiration for a sea of failure, since success crowns the efforts of poetical geniuses far less frequently than those of skilled artisans.

Taste, in minds more orderly than appreciative, is often suffocated by scholarship. Knowledge concerning man, period or text absorbs them, till beauty, whose 120