It is
the pleading of an able advocate, not the charge of an impartial judge.
Dr. Brandes has so profound an admiration for the man who dares to rebel
that he fails to do justice to the motives of society in protecting
itself against him. It is not to be denied that the iconoclast may be in
the right and society in the wrong; but it is by no means a foregone
conclusion that such is the case. If society did not, with the fierce
instinct of self-preservation, guard its traditional morality against
such assailants as Byron and Shelley, civilization would suffer. The
conservative bias of the Philistine (though not so outwardly attractive)
is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic
zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human
society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy
would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any
startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which
one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing
this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact of his being a
great poet justified the outrage.
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