How shall we know him?Ye shall know him not,Till, ended hate and scorn,To the grave he's borne.[Footnote:When the True Poet Comes.]
Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring
Of these states the poet is the equable man,Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric,fail of their full returns.[Footnote:By Blue Ontario's Shore.]
As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the poet,—that of making charges against his truthfulness,—the poet resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, inThe Bard,lays the wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow,Gladys and her Island;Helen Hunt Jackson,The Singer's Hills;J. G. Holland,Jacob Hurd's Child.]
To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton,More Poets Yet.] As for the professional critic, he becomes an ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: Burns,The Poet's Progress;Keats,Epistle to George Felton Matthew;Tennyson,To —— After Reading a Life and Letters;Longfellow,The Poets;Thomas Buchanan Read,The Master Poets;Paul Hamilton Hayne,Though Dowered with Instincts;Henry Timrod,A Vision of Poesy;George Meredith,Bellerophon;S. L. Fairfield,The Last Song(1832); S. J. Cassells,A Poet's Reflections(1851); Richard Gilder,The New Poet;Richard Realf,Advice Gratis(1898); James Whitcomb Riley,An Outworn Sappho;Paul Laurence Dunbar,The Poet;Theodore Watts-Dunton,The Octopus of the Golden Isles;Francis Ledwidge,The Coming Poet.] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and inThe Woodman and the Nightingaleexpresses through an allegory the murderous designs of the public.
A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem calledThe Seraph and the Poet.InA Vision of Poetsshe betrays less indignation, apparently believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are described:
Where the heart of each should beat,There seemed a wound instead of it,From whence the blood dropped to their feet.
The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter waters,
And toads seen crawling on his hand,And clinging bats, but dimly scanned,Full in his face their wings expand.A paleness took the poet's cheek;"Must I drink here?" He seemed to seekThe lady's will with utterance meek:"Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"(And this time she spoke cheerfully)Behooves thee know world's cruelty.
The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins,Poems of Personality(1909); Cale Young Rice,Aeschylus.] and Euripides. [Footnote: Bulwer Lytton,Euripides;Browning,Balaustion's Adventure;Richard Burton,The First Prize.] From Latin writers our poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." [Footnote:Adonais.See also Robert Bridges,Nero.] Of the great renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously represents even him as suffering triple punishment,—flogging, imprisonment and exile,—for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: SeeWm. Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond,Dante; Sarah King Wiley,Dante and Beatrice; Rossetti,Dante at Verona; Oscar Wilde,Ravenna.] and Tasso [Footnote: Byron,The Lament of Tasso; Shelley,Song for Tasso; James Thomson, B. V.,Tasso to Leonora.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton'sAndre Chenier, and Alfred Lang'sGerard de Nervalcome to mind.]
Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley,Adonais; Coleridge,Monody on the Death of Chatterton; Keats,Sonnet on Chatterton; James Montgomery,Stanzas on Chatterton; Rossetti,Sonnet to Chatterton; Edward Dowden,Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's Chatterton; W. A. Percy,To Chatterton.] Southey is singled out by Landor for especial commiseration;Who Smites the Woundedis an indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all geniuses:
Alas! what snows are shedUpon thy laurelled head,Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!Malignity lets noneApproach the Delphic throne;A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame'shundred tongues.[Footnote:To Southey,1833.]
The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse.
Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, [Footnote: See T. H. Chivers,Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada, andByron(1853); Charles Soran,Byron(1842); E. F. Hoffman,Byron(1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought,
The Pythian of the age one arrow drewAnd smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow,They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low.[Footnote:Adonais.]
The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his critics is dying out, though Shelley'sAdonaiswill go far toward giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote:At the Grave of Keats.] brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile self-characterization into his mouth:
I, the Boy-poet, whom with curseThey hounded on to death's untimely doom.[Footnote: T. L. Harris,Lyrics of the Golden Age(1856).]
In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius … never content till they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, 1845.]
With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches for the sincerity of his statement, in theHymn to Intellectual Beauty:
Never joy illumed my browUnlinked with hope that thou wouldst freeThis world from its dark slavery.
Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: See E. C. Stedman,Ariel; James Thomson, B. V.,Shelley; Alfred Austin,Shelley's Death; Stephen Vincent Benét,The General Public.]
The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one
Who in another's fate now wept his own.
Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, Joaquin Miller,I Shall Remember, andVale; Francis Ledwidge,The Visitation of Peace.]
Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by theCanterbury Tales, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in theCanterbury Pilgrims, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." [Footnote:By Blue Ontario's Shore.] Emerson tries to get on common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to some extent,[Footnote: SeeThe Enchanter.] and it is consistent with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as Emerson:
There cannot be confusion of sound forgot,A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.[Footnote:Pandeen.]
But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, "Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. W. Holmes,To Longfellow; P. H. Hayne,To Henry W. Longfellow; T. B. Read,A Leaf from the Past; E. C. Stedman,J. G. H.; P. L. Dunbar,James Whitcombe Riley; J. W. Riley,Rhymes of Ironquill.] for their promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches.
There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is essential to the poet. In thePreludehe relates how, from early childhood,
I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,The self-sufficing power of solitude.
Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse:
These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalkPainted on rich men's floors, for one feast night.[Footnote:Personal Talk.]
So he describes the poet's character:
He is retired as noontide dewOr fountain in a noonday grove.[Footnote:The Poet's Epitaph.]
In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed none." [Footnote:Michael Angelo.] Emerson expressed the same mood frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind:
Think me not unkind and rudeThat I walk alone in grove and glen;I go to the god of the wood,To fetch his word to men.[Footnote:The Apology.]
He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet:
Men consort in camp and town,But the poet dwells alone.[Footnote:Saadi.]
Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of the poet's personality:
I have no brothers and no peersAnd the dearest interferes;When I would spend a lonely day,Sun and moon are in my way.[Footnote:The Poet.]
Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John Clare,The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am; James Gates Percival,The Bard; Joseph Rodman Drake,Brorix(1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade,My Heritage; Whittier,The Tent on the Beach; Mrs. Frances Gage,The Song of the Dreamer(1867); R. H. Stoddard,Utopia; Abram J. Ryan,Poets; Richard H. Dana,The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet; Frances Anne Kemble,The Fellowship of Genius(1889); F. S. Flint,Loneliness(1909); Lawrence Hope,My Paramour was Loneliness(1905); Sara Teasdale,Alone.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet declares:
For me, I'd rather liveWith this weak human heart and yearning blood,Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls.More brave, more beautiful than myself must beThe man whom I can truly call my friend.[Footnote: Alexander Smith,A Life Drama.]
So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, because the affections that most people expend on many human relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of such communion, saying to Mary,
If men must rise and stamp with fury blindOn his pure name who loves them—thou and I,Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillityLike lamps into the world's tempestuous night,—Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by,That burn from year to year with inextinguished light.[Footnote: Introduction toThe Revolt of Islam.]
But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as Herrick has made immortal by hisLines to Ben Jonson.[Footnote: The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, however. See Ben Jonson,Essay on Donne.] A good deal of nineteenth century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats'Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, Browning'sAt the Mermaid, Watts-Dunton'sChristmas at the Mermaid, E. A. Robinson'sBen Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, Josephine Preston Peabody'sMarlowe, and Alfred Noyes'Tales of the Mermaid Innall present fondly imagined accounts of the gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish among poets of the last century,—at least they were overhung by no glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: SeeA Fable for Critics.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson,The New Timon and the Poet; Bulwer Lytton,The New Timon; Swinburne,Essay on Whitman. For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater,To Alice Meynell(1911); Shaemas O'Sheel,The Poets with the Sounding Gong(1912); Robert Graves,The Voice of Beauty Drowned(1920).]
Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:
Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,And cast them into shape some other day;Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.
The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded inJulian and Maddalo, was of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited…. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. (Shelley?) undated.] Arnold'sThyrsis, Tennyson'sIn Memoriam, and more recently, George Edward Woodberry'sNorth Shore Watch, indicate that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.
Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. InTo a Skylark, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." Employing the opposite figure in theDefense of Poetry, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet inAlastorwe are told,
He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.
Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded inStanzas Written in Dejection, and also inAdonais. In the latter poem he says of himself,
He came the last, neglected and apart,
and describes himself as
companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell.
Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly inThe Buried Life, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation.Sordellois a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, inA Renegade Poet on the Poet:
He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should ever do as other men.
One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and characterizes himself,
I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech,Love their love or mine own love to them teach,A bastard barred from their inheritance,* * * * *In antre of this lowly body set,Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.[Footnote:Sister Songs.]
But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable consequence of his genius,—that he
Spares but the cloudy border of his baseTo the foiled searching of mortality.[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet,Shakespeare.]
The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy,To Shakespeare.]
Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second revolution of the egocentric circle.
If I might dwell where IsrafelHath dwelt, and he where I,He might not sing so wildly wellA mortal melody,
sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There is an inconsistency in the poet's attitude,—the same inconsistency that lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,—and yet it is to him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it as from a prison house.
One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Tasso, a derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all—a woman Sappho, suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can consume all fetters of heredity, sex, health, environment and material endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine his spirit.
Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in poems even of such bulk as thePreludeone does not find a complete analysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the restless energy and acumen of his father, Taurello, with the refinement and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. InAurora Leighone might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must assume, if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of qualities derived from more remote ancestors.
The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, [Footnote: SeeThalassius.] since it typifies the union in the poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful strains which, in mysterious fusion, constitute the poetic nature. In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness.
There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her. Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of the woman who was "no churl" as
A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes,And white hair blown back softly from a faceEtherially fierce, as might have lookedCassandra in old age.[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. [Footnote: See Beattie,The Minstrel; Wordsworth,The Prelude; Cowper,Lines on his Mother's Picture; Swinburne,Ode to his Mother; J. G. Holland,Kathrina; William Vaughan Moody,The Daguerreotype; Anna Hempstead Branch,Her Words.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale,The Mother of a Poet, gives a poetical explanation of this type of woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives,The Castaway(1904); J. D. Bacon,A Family Affair(1900).] is not found in verse. One might almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote:A Ballad in Blank Verse, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.]
The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch,Her Words.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said to the little Viola,
If angels have hereditary wings,If not by Salic law is handed downThe poet's laurel crown,To thee, born in the purple of the throne,The laurel must belong.[Footnote:Sister Songs.]
But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in which they grow.
What have poets to say on the larger question of their social inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than to create, beauty,—that he is the connoisseur rather than the genius,—seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage.
Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of "Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. [Footnote: SeeLord Burleigh, Eleanore inA Becket, and the Count inThe Falcon.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets areThe Troubadour, Praed;The King's Tragedy, Rossetti;David, Charles di Trocca, Cale Young Rice.]
None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century poet as John Hughes, in linesOn a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal Man, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: SeeThe Patron.] and Beattie,[Footnote: SeeThe Minstrel.] also, seem not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is merely personal:
Gie me ae spark of nature's fire!That's a' the learning I desire.Then, though I drudge through dub and mireAt plough or cart,My muse, though homely in attire,May touch the heart.[Footnote:Epistle to Lapraik.]
It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with "nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns see Thomas Campbell,Ode to Burns; Whittier,Burns; Joaquim Miller,Burns and Byron; William Bennett,To the Memory of Burns; A. B. Street,Robbie Burns(1867); O. W. Holmes,The Burns Centennial; Richard Realf,Burns; Simon Kerl,Burns(1868); Shelley Halleck,Burns.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found in the character of the old pedlar, in theExcursion. The origin of Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May Sinclair's novel,The Divine Fire, who is presumably modeled after Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes,At the Sign of the Golden Shoe; Josephine Preston Peabody,Marlowe.] Here and there, the poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare,The Peasant Poet; Mrs. Browning,Lady Geraldine's Courtship; Robert Buchanan,Poet Andrew; T. E. Browne,Tommy Big Eyes; Whittier,Eliot; J. G. Saxe,Murillo and his Slave.] And at present, with the penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John Davidson,A Ballad in Blank Verse; Vachel Lindsay,The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son; John Masefield,Dauber; Francis Carlin,MacSweeney the Rhymer(1918).] Still, for the most part, the present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning,
What if men have foundPoor footmen or rich merchants on the rollOf his forbears? Did they beget his soul?[Footnote: Henry van Dyke,Sonnet.]
If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? since singers tell
us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.[Footnote:The Centenary of Shelley.]
as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their father Spenser, who argues,
So every spirit, as it is most pure,And hath in it the more of heavenly light,So it the fairer body doth procureTo habit in, and it more fairly dightWith cheerful grace, and amiable sight;For of the soul the body form doth take,For soul is form, and doth the body make.[Footnote:Hymn in Honour of Beauty.]
What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed Byron, and so on, almostad infinitum. Would not a survey of notable geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which
Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote:The SensitivePlant.]
Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his pronouncement, admitting—
Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mindDwells in deformed tabernacle drownd,Either by chance, against the course of kind,Or through unaptness of the substance found,Which it assumed of some stubborn groundThat will not yield unto her form's direction,But is preformed with some foul imperfection.
But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from Alcæus' line,
Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho.
As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of his extant portrait:
A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-ofIs beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright,Low-lidded now, and luminous as love,Anon soul-searching, ominous as night,Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deepsWhere-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps.[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth,At the Mermaid(1889).]
The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti,Sonnet on Chatterton.] has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their imaginations inevitably turn to
The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair,The lean, athletic body, deftly plannedTo carry that swift soul of fire and air;The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grandHeroic shoulders![Footnote: Alfred Noyes,At the Sign of the Golden Shoe.]
It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson,Rupert Brooke.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage.
We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by no means universal;—that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore'sLines on a Squinting Poetess, and Praed'sThe Talented Man. In the latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,
He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,Is all that these eyes can adore.He's lame,—but Lord Byron was lame, Love,And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.
Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the streetFor my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,[Footnote:Spoon River Anthology.]
for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.
Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and assures us,
Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,[Footnote:Out from Behind This Mask.]
but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing features?
Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture of Keats,
The real Adonis, with the hymenealFresh vernal buds half sunk betweenHis youthful curls.[Footnote:A Vision of Poets.]
It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,
A lovely youth,With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.[Footnote:A Life Drama.]
And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod,A Vision of Poesy(1898); Frances Fuller,To Edith May(1851); Metta Fuller,Lines to a Poetess(1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it.
"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth,On the Death of James Hogg; Browning,Sordello,By the Fireside; Mrs. Browning,Aurora Leigh; Principal Shairp,Balliol Scholars; Alfred Noyes,Tales of the Mermeid Inn.] poets invariably possess, but the less phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas,The Life of Charles Lamb, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was especially struck by this phenomenon. In linesTo a Poet Breaking Silence, he asserts,
Yes, in this silent interspaceGod sets his poems in thy face,
and again, inHer Portrait, he muses,
How should I gage what beauty is her dole,Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,As birds see not the casement for the sky.
It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical nature,—through his
Dream dazzled gazeAflame and burning like a god in song.[Footnote: W. W. Gibson,To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke.]
Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." [Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin,John Keats, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one—the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth,On the Death of James Hogg] Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,
With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fictitious poet that
His steadfast eye burnt inwardlyAs burning out his soul,[Footnote: 'The Poet's Vow.]
we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done.
The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: SeeA Poet's Epitaph, andSonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes.] Mrs. Browning notes his
Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclinedBefore the sovran-thought of his own mind.[Footnote:On a Portrait of Wordsworth.]
Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. I. Osborne,Arthur Hugh Clough.]
But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to
See, no longer blinded with his eyes,[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke,Not With Vain Tears.]
and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness inSamson Agonisteshave had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton,
The living throne, the sapphire blazeWhere angels tremble while they gazeHe saw, but blasted with excess of light,Closed his eyes in endless night,[Footnote:Progress of Poesy.]
and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John Hughes,To the Memory of Milton; William Lisle Bowles,Milton in Age; Bulwer Lytton,Milton; W. H. Burleigh,The Lesson; R. C. Robbins,Milton.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may
By the darkness of thine eyes discernHow piercing was the light within thy soul.[Footnote: See Rossetti,P. B. Marston; Swinburne,Transfiguration, Marston, Light; Watts-Dunton,A Grave by theSea.]
Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an assertion as that of Keats,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.[Footnote: See Keats,Sonnet on Homer, Landor,Homer, Laertes,Agatha; Joyce Kilmer,The Proud Poet, Vision.]
Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth,
Thou that, when first my quickened earThy deeper harmonies might hear,I imaged to myself as old and blind,For so were Milton and Maeonides,[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord,Wordsworth(1845).]
and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to his imaginary artists.[Footnote: SeeThe Blind Poet, andLost. See also Francis CarlinBlind O'Cahan(1918.)]
But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite picture—that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton'sDispute of the Poets. The spiritual one
Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,
but his brother,
The one with brighter hues and darker curlsClustering and purple as the fruit of the vine,Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich lifeWhom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delightFrom orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.
The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of John Davidson'sBallad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poetis
A youth whose sultry eyesBold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust.
But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello,
Yourselves shall trace(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,A sharp and restless lip, so well combineWith that calm brow) a soul fit to receiveDelight at every sense; you can believeSordello foremost in the regal classNature has broadly severed from her massOf men, and framed for pleasure…* * * * *You recognize at once the finer dressOf flesh that amply lets in lovelinessAt eye and ear.
Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in theCanterbury Tales, is described by the burly host,
He in the waast is shape as wel as I;This were a popet in an arm tenbraceFor any woman, smal and fair of face?[Footnote:Prologue to Sir Thopas.]
Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the handsome young squire, who
Coude songes make, and wel endyte.[Footnote:Prologue.]
Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play,The Canterbury Pilgrims, derives the heartiest enjoyment from Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, interpolated by his friends into theCastle of Indolence, to remain, though it begins with the line,
A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems.
And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's callous assertion, "I am fat and gross…. In my youth I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." [Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.]
Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet couldnotbe a glorious eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne,Joyce Kilmer.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." [Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday,Memoir of Joyce Kilmer, p. 62.] Of course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and drinking and breeding" [Footnote:Song of Myself.] automatically shut him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a poet.
It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length in Olive Dargan's drama,The Poet. So cordial is his detestation of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: SeeAs I Sit Writing Here.] and George Meredith lays the weakness ofManfredto the fact that it was
Projected from the bilious Childe.[Footnote: George Meredith,Manfred.]
But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid.
To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth'sPreludedescribes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. [Footnote:Kathrina.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his favorite poet as
A man who measured six feet four:Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,Compact his frame, his muscles of the best.[Footnote:A Portrait.]
With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers,
A heavy handed blow, I think,Would make your veins drip scented ink.[Footnote:To Certain Poets.]
But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce,Fame and the Poet, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: SeeThe Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry.] finds himself unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint,
We are compared to that sort of person,Who wanders about announcing his sexAs if he had just discovered it.[Footnote:The Condolence.]
The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney to argue,
Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life,You need the lower life to stand uponIn order to reach up unto that higher;And none can stand a tip-toe in that placeHe cannot stand in with two stable feet.[Footnote:Aurora Leigh. See also the letter to Robert Browning,May 6, 1845.]
Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins,Michael Angelo(1904).]
Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention:
In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: Thesesemi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration,for in reality the beggars have the advantageof us.Theirnerves are always sensitive and keyedto pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up tothe point. We must dig painfully through the outerlayers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while theinvalids are all spirit.[Footnote: FromLandscape Painters, p. 184.]
That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art,Degeneration, was able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.]
Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of whom we learn,
Too long had sickness left her pining traceWith slow still touch on each decaying grace;Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien;Despair upon his languid smile was seen.[Footnote:Monody on Henry Headley.]
We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. Hogg,Life of Shelley, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out of his verse. So early as the composition of theRevolt of Islam,Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction,
Death and love are yet contending for their prey,
and inAdonaishe appears as
A powerGirt round with weakness.* * * * *A light spear …Vibrated, as the everbearing heartShook the weak hand that grasped it.
Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as consumption saps his strength:
You might see his colour come and go,And the softest strain of music madeSweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fadeAmid the dew of his tender eyes;And the breath with intermitting flowMade his pale lips quiver and part.[Footnote:Rosalind and Helen.]
The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White,Sonnet to Consumption.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the last time in Tennyson'sThe Brook, where the young poet hastens to Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence.
Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero:
More tremulousThan the soft star that in the azure EastTrembles with pity o'er bright bleeding dayWas his frail soul.[Footnote:A Life Drama.]
Arnold, likewise, inThyrsis, follows the poetic tradition in thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death:
Some life of men unblestHe knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.He went, his piping took a troubled soundOf storms that rage outside our happy ground.He could not wait their passing; he is dead.
In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse:
The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn,The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,The almond face that Giotto drew so well,The weary face of Dante.[Footnote:Ravenna.]
Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of theInfernoso preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another,
Behold him, how Hell's reekHas crisped his beard and singed his cheek.[Footnote:Dante at Verona.]
A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore:
And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.[Footnote:A Captain of Song.]
In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is
A youth who as with toil and travelHad grown quite weak and gray before his time.[Footnote:Prince Athanase, a fragment.]
InAlastor, too, we see the hero wasting away until
His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,Sung dirges in the wind: his listless handHung like dead bone within his withered skin;Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shoneAs in a furnace burning secretlyFrom his dark eyes alone.
The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile.
Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast by Fate into the body of a woman?
As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,—in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall,Miriam.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey,Sappho; Freneau,Monument of Phaon; Kingsley,Sappho, Swinburne,On the Cliffs,Sapphics,Anactoria; Cale Young Rice,Sappho's Death Song; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy Mackaye,Sappho and Phaon; W. A. Percy,Sappho in Lenkos.] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets—Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: Browning,One Word More,Preface to The Ring and the Book; James Thomson, B. V.,E. B. B.; Sidney Dobell,On the Death of Mrs. Browning.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne,Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti,New Year's Eve,Dedication to Christina Rossetti.] Emily Brontë, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips,Emily Brontë.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson,Sister Songs,On her Photograph,To a Poet Breaking Silence.] Felicia Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean,Felicia Hemans.] Adelaide Proctor, [Footnote: Edwin Arnold,Adelaide Anne Proctor.] Helen Hunt, [Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder,H.H.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote:Ibid.,To E. Lazarus.]—one finds woman the subject of complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne,On the Cliffs.] So the feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise.
As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of their style. John Hughes [Footnote: SeeTo the Author of "A Fatal Friendship."] and Tom Moore [Footnote: SeeTo Mrs. Henry Tighe.] both deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play,The Blue Stocking, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: SeeThe Catalogue. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses isThe Squinting Poetess.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love rather than a literary career. [Footnote: SeeTo a Poetess. More seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend with poetical tastes. [Footnote: SeeTo Write as Your Sweet Mother Does.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and heroine,