which transplants it may prove the enemy of its further growth. For discipleship will often take a perverse pride in refusing to admire and love, except where it has the warrant of its master's actual example.
All these are kinds of initial bigotries which may easily be so ingrained in a person of fourteen that hardly any upheaval can be conceived which should lay bare the foundations of their humanity to this most congenial of influences, the power of the best poetry.
A third class are those who are meanly corrupt; endowed with a little taste, they have employed it on personal or social ends, instead of desiring to be employed by it in the discovery of excellence. They have sought sentimental consolations or a pick-me-up for enthusiasm, and used and abused this nectar as others use and abuse alcohol.
Or by its means they have tried to shine in society, to pass for cultured people cheaply. Or they have learned to understand and theorise about it in order to teach in a school or give an extension lecture; or, through the weakness of all their other tastes, have drifted into literary criticism or a professorship at a university by way of excusing their existence.
In all these ways taste may be harnessed to a market cart, and trot backwards and forwards on the highway, respected among other respectable trades, but stunted, cowed and gelded.
Now, suppose that all these dangers have been avoided—and there are few walks of life not notably infested by one or another of them—right across the road of progress in good taste there then lies waiting a more terrible ogre, who enslaves great geniuses and starves minds potentially as rich as the Indies. He is that species of vanity which admires what is impertinent or accidental because it is a man's own. All satisfaction with mere cleverness, mere daintiness, mere subtlety, oddity, bravado, bluffness, etc.,
