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Kind hearts are more than laurel crowns,
And simple mien than Saxon song.

Ouida does a public service by insisting that it is presumptuous of the crowd to judge the conduct of men of genius, whose life is pitched in quite a different key, and runs very frequently in the melancholy minor mode. The travail of soul, the workings of the mind, the agonies and the raptures of genius must be so remote from the common ken, that it is unjust to apply to it the vulgar meteyard; and so, far be it from me to blame the inspired singer of “Crossing the Bar,” or to imagine that he could have been other than he was! All the same, it is permissible to regret that he should have throughout his life pandered to the popular conception of a poet. There was something of a robuster quality in Browning, who managed to be a seer and a mystic in despite of afternoon teas. Ouida beats the tom-tom far too loudly. From one point of view the post-mortem revelations of great men’s friends, which kindle her ire, perform a public good, even if at the expense of a private wrong. The attempt to apotheosise human nature, to invest our kindred clay with theatrical glamour and to drape it from the property-room, this mythical creation of “a magnified non-natural man,” what is it all but the perpetuation of the false psychology of the past? There is no durable good in this childish “make-believe.” It is time for humanity to outgrow this puerile self-deception about its powers and characteristics and limitations. A great man is a man as well as great, and he may be all the wonderful things that Carlyle claimed without ceasing to be human and therefore erring. And if he would go about simply and naturally, without developing a self-consciousness as vast and unhealthy as the liver of a goose intended for pate, he would be happier and wiser, and secure the inattention he yearns for. Moreover, while Ouida is rightly intolerant of the abuse of genius by the bourgeois, the dictionary scarcely affords her own genius sufficient vituperation for the bourgeois. I am at a loss to understand by what logic genius gains the right to hate the bourgeois. It has not the excuse of the bourgeois–stupidity. That the crowd hates superiority and is venomously anxious to degrade it to its own level, is one of Ouida’s many delusions about life. Discounting vulgar curiosity, a good deal of the crowd’s interest in genius, however annoying and ridiculous the shapes it takes, springs at bottom from a sense of reverence and admiration; and surely it is sheer priggishness, if it be not rank midsummer madness, on the part of genius to regard itself as persecuted by foolish and malicious persons. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Still it would be unjust to deny her perfect seclusion from the world, if she feels she needs it.

Perhaps the mildest form of persecution is that of the autographomaniacs. “They send me my own books,” one of the most popular authors in England complained to me pathetically the other day, “and they ask me to write in them. But to write in them is all that you can do for the books of your friends. If you do this for strangers, what is there left for your friends?” Although far less beloved of the book-buyer than the illustrious novelist, I could yet offer him the sympathy of a minor fellow-sufferer. It is the American reader who is the main persecutor. He is not “gentle,” forsooth–a very bully, rather. But why do I say “he,” when it is generally “she”? “You have eluded all my wiles hitherto,” she wrote me the other day: “now I ask you straight out for your autograph.” This honesty would have softened me had I not just had to pay fivepence on the letter–and for the second time that day! Of course her request was not accompanied by a stamped envelope either, though, if it had been, the stamp would have been an American; invalid, a pictorial irony. She has a trick, moreover, of addressing you–most economically–care of your American publishers, who expedite the letter with vengeful empressement, so that you pay double at your end of the Atlantic. And when everything else is in order, her epistle is insufficiently stamped, and your income is frittered away in futile fivepences. It is too much. The cup is full. We must no longer bow our necks beneath the oppressor’s yoke, no longer tremble at the postman’s knock. We must strike, instead–we other men of letters. For authors, too, are human: manual labourers, overworked and underpaid, with no hope of an eight hours’ day. Their pay must not be still further reduced by this monstrous stamp-tax. Will not some Burns–more poetical than John–raise the banner of revolt? Perhaps William Morris may reconcile his hitherto contradictory roles by placing himself at the head of the movement. Henceforward no author is to despatch his autograph to an admirer, charm she never so cunningly. Beshrew these admirers! a man’s personality is in his books, not in his scrawl. Whosoever violates this prescription shall be accounted a blackleg. On one condition only shall autographs be sent–to wit, that they be paid for.