Let us criticize it as such, remembering that we may be reading
the first characteristic work of a new literary era. Let us give
over being shocked. Those who were shocked by Byron, the apostle
of expansiveness, merely encouraged him to be more shocking. Nor
is it any use to sit upon the hydrant of this new expansiveness.
If a youth desires to tell the world what has happened to him, he
must be allowed to do so, provided he has skill and power enough
to make us listen. And these juniors have power even when skill
has not yet been granted them. What is needed is a hose to stop
the waste of literary energy, to conserve and direct it. Call for
a hose, then, as much as you please, but do not try to stop the
waters with your Moses's rod of conservative indignation.
It is no crime to be a romantic,--it is a virtue, if that is the
impulse of the age,--but it is a shame to be a wasteful romantic.
Waste has always been the romantic vice--waste of emotion, waste
of words, the waste that comes from easy profusion of sentiment and
the formlessness that permits it. Think of "The Excursion," of
Southey, and of the early poems of Shelley, of Scott at his
wordiest.
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