e author of "Robert Elsmere" exhibits that
polished scholar and brilliant student as one who gave up teaching
because he could find no audience on a level with his ability or worthy
of his instruction. Having begun by despising others, he ends by
despising himself. Now the popularity of Elsmere's character witnesses
to the fact that our generation includes a large number of cynics who
scorn their fellows and in Elsmere see themselves as "in an open
glass." To-day this tendency toward harshness of judgment has become
more pronounced, and there seems to be no leader so noble as to escape
brutal criticism and no movement whose white flag may not be smirched
by mud-slingers. What epithets are hurled at each new idea! What
torrents of ridicule are emptied out upon each social movement!

The fact that society has oftentimes destroyed its noblest geniuses
avails little for the restraint of harshness. For years England was
wildly merry at Turner's expense. The newspapers cartooned his
paintings. Reviews spoke of them as "color blotches." The rich over
their champagne made merry at the great artist's expense. After a
while men found a little respite from the mad chase for wealth and
pleasure and discovered that Turner's extreme examples represented
peculiar moods in nature, seen only by those who had traveled as widely
as had Turner, while his great landscapes were as rich in imaginative
quality as those of any artist of all ages. Only when it was too late,
only when harshness had broken the man's heart, and scorn had fatally
wounded his genius, did scholars begin to adorn their pages by
references to Turner's fame, did the rich begin to pay fabulous sums
for the very pictures they had once despised, the nation set apart the
best room in its gallery for Turner's works, while the people wove for
his white tombstone wreaths they had denied his brow and paid his dead
ashes honors refused his living spirit.

In similar vein we remember the English-speaking world has recently
been celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Keats, who is the only
pure Greek in all English literature, for whose imagination "a thing of
beauty was a joy forever," and whose genius in divining the secrets of
the beautiful amounted to inspiration. We know now that no poet in all
time, who died so young, has left so much that is precious. Scholars
are not wanting who believe that had he lived to see his maturity Keats
would have ranked with th