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"Poetry," says Professor Bradley, "is a way of representing truth; but there is in it, as its detractors have always insisted, a certain untruth or illusion. We need not deny this, so long as we remember that the illusion is conscious, that no one wishes to deceive, and that no one is deceived.
Like Maintenon, Héloïse was willing to seem what she was not, only to be explained on the ground that concubinage was a less evil, in the eyes of the Church, than marriage in a priest. But even a secret marriage was attended with great embarrassment. The news of it leaks out through the servants. The envious detractors of Abélard rejoice in his weakness and his humiliation.
He is very near to us. Washington is indeed first in the hearts of his countrymen. Washington has no detractors. There may come a time when another will take first place in the affections of the people, but that time is not yet ripe.
I speak from full knowledge. I know. I may remark here that, taking the other extreme from these detractors or gossips, there exist persons who maintain that Commodus never drove a chariot in public, let alone as a competing jockey in a succession of races in the Circus Maximus on a regular festival day in full view of all Rome; likewise that he not only never, as a gladiator, killed an adversary in public combat, but never so much as shed blood in any of his fights; asserting that he merely practised with lath foils inside the Palace.
These ideas are forced so strongly upon me as I travel westward, that I almost fear that I am writing in a "hifalutin" style, so I will only add that I think that our Oriental Grand Vizier knew Oriental character and the way of influencing Oriental modes of thinking better than his detractors when he added et Imperatrix to the much loved V. R.
Jerome. So, if they will, let my detractors imagine that I have played an occasional game of draughts for a pastime or, if they prefer, taken a ride on a hobby-horse.
In all times, the storm of persecution has cleansed the threshing-floor of the Lord." And yet, notwithstanding all the bitterness of the persecution, the number of Protestants increased. It is difficult to determine their numbers. Their apologists said they amounted to three millions; their detractors that they did not amount to four hundred thousand.
There are also, besides the prologues and epilogues of the several books, a few pieces in which Phaedrus speaks in his own person, defending himself against detractors with an acrid tone which recalls the Terentian prologues.
Of the men of genius who have produced a great effect on their own time, there is no one concerning whom such fluctuating opinions have prevailed within forty years as in regard to Carlyle. His old admirers became his detractors, and those who first disliked him became his friends.
I assure you I see no decent defence you can make, at least if your detractors have the humour to commend the independence of the writings while the writer is a slave and a voluntary beast of burden before their eyes.
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