It may be sordid, like
the lamp of Aladdin, in its externals; what care we, while the touch of
it builds palaces for us, makes us rich as only men in dream-land are
rich, and lords to the utmost bound of imagination? So, when people talk
of the ungrateful way in which the world treats its geniuses, they speak
unwisely. There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of
mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not,
sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius takes possession
of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, for its chisel, _him_ the
world treats according to his deserts. Does Burns drink? It sets him to
gauging casks of gin. For, remember, it is not to the practical world
that the genius appeals; it _is_ the practical world which judges of the
man's fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. No amount of
patronage could have made distilled liquors less toothsome to Robbie
Burns, as no amount of them could make a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd.
There is an old story in the _Gesta Romanorum_ of a priest who was found
fault with by one of his parishioners because his life was in painful
discordance with his teaching. So one day he takes his critic out to a
stream, and, giving him to drink of it, asks him if he does not find it
sweet and pure water.
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