THE ROMANTIC DRAMA
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understand, nor admire what they cannot feel. What odds if this is at first unfair to certain works of art? The people actually come nearer to a true appreciation of them in not accepting than do the snobs in applauding them; and, besides, they preserve intact their source of truth, whence springs all greatness of soul. At any rate, I should feel no anxiety for such a people. Well endowed, like our own, and sincere—if they are but relieved of the excessive burden of labor under which they now struggle, and given a chance to think—there is nothing to which they cannot attain. But false feeling and false thinking engendered by most of our present-day poetry would otherwise contaminate them with an ineradicable taint.
