The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the
burden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but
never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling
literature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple as
the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar
periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization--by kings, judges, poets, and
priests.
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