At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in its
most gracious mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of
letters. It is worth the pains to ask why, and to attempt to show
how much of an author's literary quality is involved in his
attitude towards his audience. Such an inquiry will take us, it is
true, into bad company, and exhibit the vicious, the fatuous, and
the frivolous posturing to an admiring crowd. But style is a
property of all written and printed matter, so that to track it to
its causes and origins is a task wherein literary criticism may
profit by the humbler aid of anthropological research.

Least of all authors is the poet subject to the tyranny of his
audience. "Poetry and eloquence," says John Stuart Mill, "are both
alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be
excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard,
poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the
peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter
unconsciousness of a listener." Poetry, according to this
discerning criticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the thoughts rise
unforced and unchecked, taking musical form in obedience only to
the law of their being, giving pleasure to an audience only as the
mountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst of a passing
traveller. In lyric poetry, language, from being a utensil, or a
medium of traffic and barter, passes back to its place among
natural sounds; its affinity is with the wind among the trees and
the stream among the rocks; it is the cry of the heart, as simple
as the breath we draw, and as little ordered with a view to
applause. Yet speech grew up in society, and even in the most
ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of understanding and