Lord Bacon says the first sight of any work
really new and first-rate in beauty and originality always arouses
something disagreeable and repulsive. Voltaire term'd the Shaksperean
works "a huge dunghill"; Hamlet he described (to the Academy, whose
members listen'd with approbation) as "the dream of a drunken savage,
with a few flashes of beautiful thoughts." And not the Ferney sage
alone; the orthodox judges and law-givers of France, such as La
Harpe, J. L. Geoffrey, and Chateaubriand, either join'd in Voltaire's
verdict, or went further. Indeed the classicists and regulars there
still hold to it. The lesson is very significant in all departments.
People resent anything new as a personal insult. When umbrellas were
first used in England, those who carried them were hooted and
pelted so furiously that their lives were endanger'd. The same rage
encounter'd the attempt in theatricals to perform women's parts by
real women, which was publicly consider'd disgusting and outrageous.
Byron thought Pope's verse incomparably ahead of Homer and Shakspere.
One of the prevalent objections, in the days of Columbus was, the
learn'd men boldly asserted that if a ship should reach India she
would never get back again, because the rotundity of the globe would
present a kind of mountain, up which it would be impossible to sail
even with the most favorable wind.
"Modern poets," says a leading Boston journal, "enjoy longevity.
Browning lived to be seventy-seven. Wordsworth, Bryant, Emerson, and
Longfellow were old men.
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