likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion
pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they
will, of his achievement. Sometimes they come late.

This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour and self-respect, is
unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand by intimacy mutual
concession to a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal with
masks, that when they see a face they are shocked as by some
grotesque. Now a poet, like Montaigne's naked philosopher, is all
face; and the bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics is the
greater. Wherever he attracts general attention he cannot but be
misunderstood. The generality of modern men and women who pretend
to literature are not hypocrites, or they might go near to divine
him,--for hypocrisy, though rooted in cowardice, demands for its
flourishing a clear intellectual atmosphere, a definite aim, and a
certain detachment of the directing mind. But they are habituated
to trim themselves by the cloudy mirror of opinion, and will mince
and temporise, as if for an invisible audience, even in their
bedrooms. Their masks have, for the most part, grown to their
faces, so that, except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it
is hardly themselves that they express. The apparition of a poet
disquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, and
apologises to no idols. His candour frightens them: they avert
their eyes from it; or they treat it as a licensed whim; or, with a
sudden gleam of insight, and apprehension of what this means for
them and theirs, they scream aloud for fear. A modern instance may
be found in the angry protestations launched against Rossetti's
Sonnets, at the time of their first appearance, by a writer who has
since matched himself very exactly with an audience of his own
kind. A stranger freak of burgess criticism is everyday fare in