Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/127

Rh with which fine designs have been teased or disfigured is wound of his dealing. No literature has he scarred more deeply than our English. Shakespeare himself could not defend the grandest poems ever conceived against his barbarity.

"''Be true to your taste,' this mocking giant cries, 'your own taste, not any one else's. Be not overborne by tradition or corrupted by fashion. Dare on your own account and let the ideal take care of itself. What! Correct nature, correct yourself! Amazing nonsense! You are what you are; Nature is what it is. That is all we want to know; all we can admire.'"

Deluded by this advocate of a specious loyalty to taste, men tie themselves to first thoughts and raw emotions as though these were more essentially their own than thoughts cleared and polished by reflection, or emotion chastened by considerate expression. They will relinquish study in dread of tainting their originality, checking their verve, or confusing their impressions. "I want to put down just what I think, what I feel, nothing more, nothing less," they plead. Alas! had you taken up with that theory in infancy you would be a baby still.

A thriving taste is like a seedling, intensely itself, but determined to be a tree. Its possessor must be loyal to the laws of its growth and provide it with food, light, air. It does not desire instant petrifaction to preserve it from change and inconsistency, but is eager to embrace and attack the unknown in order to obtain new impressions, to arrange and recompose with its own. And as a creator who owns such a taste is constantly recasting, reconsidering and correcting his work, and eschews both haste and lethargy, so an appreciator, whose taste lives, strives after larger comprehension by watching those whom he surmises may possibly possess such; and by sifting and Rh