What is it to the world who was Allegra’s mother, or who was the prototype of Mignon, or who was the Lady of Solitude of the Elysian isles of the ‘Epipsychidion’; what matter whether Shakespeare blessed or cursed Anne Hathaway, or whether personal pains and longings inspired the doctrines of the ‘Tetrarchordon’? It matters no more than it matters whether Lesbia’s sparrow was a real bird or a metaphor, no more than it matters whether the carmen to Cerinthe were written for the poet’s pleadings in propria persona or for his friend. It matters nothing. We have ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister’; we have ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Lycidas’; we have the songs of Catullus and the elegies of Tibullus; what wants the world more than these? Alas! alas! it wants that which shall pull down the greater stature to the lower; it wants that which shall console it for its own drear dulness by showing it the red spots visible on the lustre of the sun.
The disease of ‘documents,’ as they are called in the jargon of the time, is only another name for the insatiable appetite to pry into the private life of those greater than their fellows, in the hope to find something therein wherewith to belittle them. Genius may say as it will that nothing human is alien to it, humanity always sullenly perceives that genius is genius precisely because it is something other than humanity, something beyond it, above it—never of it; something which stands aloof from it, however it may express itself as kin to it. That the soul of man is divine is a doubtful postulate; but, that whatever there is divine in a human form is to be found in genius, is true for all time. The mass of men dimly feel this, and they vaguely resent it, and dislike genius, as the multitude in India and Palestine disliked Buddha and Christ. When the tiger tears it or the cross bears it the mass of men are consoled for their own inferiority to it. In the world Prometheus is always kept chained; and the fire he brings from heaven is spat upon.
‘Oh, weep for Adonais!—The quick Dreams,
The passion-winged Ministers of thought,
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught
The love which was its music, wander not,
Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain,
But droop there, whence they spring; and mourn their lot
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain,