It is so hard to see that a sin is sometimes but a
thwarted and misdirected virtue! When Burns sighed that "the light that
led astray was light from Heaven," he was but unconsciously repeating
what a poet who of all men least needed the apology had said centuries
before.
We do not admit, that, because a man has published a volume or a
picture, he has published himself, excommunicated his soul from the
sanctuary of privacy, and made his life as common as a tavern-threshold
to every blockhead in the parish,--or that any Pharisee who kept
carefully to windward of his virtues, out of the way of infection, has
thereby earned the right to mismoralize his failings after he is dumbly
defenceless. The moral compasses that are too short for the aberration
may be, must be, unequal to the orbit. We would not deny that Burns was
a chamberer and a drunkard because he was a great poet; but we would not
admit that whiskey and wenches made him any the less the most richly
endowed genius of his century, with just title to the love and
admiration of men. It is not for us to decide whether he, who, by
doubling the suggestive and associative power of any thought, fancy,
feeling, or natural object, has so far added permanently to the sum of
human happiness, is not as sure of a welcome and a well-done from the
Infinite Fatherliness as he that has turned an honest penny by printing
a catechism; but we are sure that it is a shallow cant which holds up
the errors of men of genius as if they were especial warnings, and
proofs of how little the rarest gifts avail.
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