Occasionally
he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a
hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot
was
Like Lear's--for he had felt the sting
Of all too greatly giving
The kingdom of his mind to those
Who for it deemed him mad.
[Footnote: Cale Young Rice, _Meredith_.]
In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to
which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of
madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: See _Gladys
and Her Island_.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: See _Tasso to
Leonora_.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: See _The Singer's
Hills_.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: See _Genius_.] and George Edward
Woodberry, [Footnote: See _He Ate the Laurel and is Mad_.] concur
in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply
because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the
cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he
prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than
the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves.
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