Excerpt: ...literary centre. Every man who has a grievance is fiercely impelled to self-expression. He is not content till his grievance is published to the unheeding world. And it is well that it is so. We should be in a bad way if it were Pg 115 not for these inspired Adullamites who prevent us from resting in slothful indifference to evil. Most writers of decided individuality are incited by a more or less iconoclastic impulse. There is an idol they want to smash, a conventional lie which they want to expose. It is the same impulse which moves almost every right-minded citizen, once or twice in his life, to write a letter of protest to the newspaper. Things are going wrong in his neighborhood, and he is impatient to set them right. There are enough real grievances, and the full expression of them is a public service. But the trouble is that any one who develops a decided gift in that direction is in danger of becoming the victim of his own talent. Pg 116 Eloquent fault-finding becomes a mannerism. The original grievance loses its sharp outlines; it, as it were, passes from the solid to the gaseous state. It becomes vast, pervasive, atmospheric. It is like the London fog, enveloping all objects, and causing the eyes of those who peer through it to smart. This happened, in the last generation, to Carlyle and Ruskin, and in a certain degree to Matthew Arnold. Each had his group of enthusiastic disciples who responded eagerly to their master's call. They renounced shams or machine-made articles or middle-class Philistinism as the case might be. They went in for sincerity, or Turner, or "sweetness and light," with all the ardor of youthful Pg 117 neophytes. And it was good for them. But after a while they became, if not exactly weary in well-doing, at least a little weary of the unintermittent tirades against ill-doing. They were in the plight of the good Christian who goes to church every Sunday only to hear the parson rebuke the sins of the people who are not...