8. The Role of Prophet

One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of
being true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve,
the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most
exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our
first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became the
spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations of
Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from his
university. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of his
own children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts of
justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned in
solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified and
calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)
apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. The
purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he was
persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when dead
with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scattered
grave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers.

It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluring
one for others to follow.

"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be sure
the result will at last be justified." No doubt; but in how many
centuries? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, for
your allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, or
burned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean is
merely this--that sooner or later your principles will triumph, which
may or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles.
But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in the
interim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domestic
affections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whom
to expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the world
that if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (which
humanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely and
violence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve,
regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?
Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice which
you would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinary
citizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings.

The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a right
to expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while it
stands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark of