And through his sleep, and o'er each waking hourThoughts after thoughts, unresting multitudes,Were driven within him by some secret powerWhich bade them blaze, and live, and roll afar,Like lights and sounds, from haunted tower to tower.
Probably our jargon of the subconscious would not much impress poets, even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing in any memory, as such, to account for the fact that poetry reveals things to us above and beyond any of our actual experiences in this world.
Alchemist Memory turned his past to gold,[Footnote:A Life Drama.]
says Alexander Smith of his poet, and as an account of inspiration, the line sounds singularly flat. There is nothing here to distinguish the poet from any octogenarian dozing in his armchair.
Is Memory indeed the only Muse? Not unless she is a far grander figure than we ordinarily suppose. Of course she has been exalted by certain artists. There is Richard Wagner, with his definition of art as memory of one's past youth, or—to stay closer home—Wordsworth, with his theory of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity,—such artists have a high regard for memory. Still, Oliver Wendell Holmes is tolerably representative of the nineteenth century attitude when he points memory to a second place. It is only the aged poet, conscious that his powers are decaying, to whom Holmes offers the consolation,
Live in the past; await no moreThe rush of heaven-sent wings;Earth still has music left in storeWhile memory sighs and sings.[Footnote:Invita Minerva.]
But, though he would discourage us from our attempt to chain his genius, like a ghost, to his past life in this world, the poet is inclined to admit that Mnemosyne, in her true grandeur, has a fair claim to her title as mother of the muses. The memories of prosaic men may be, as we have described them, short and sordid, concerned only with their existence here and now, but the recollection of poets is a divine thing, reaching back to the days when their spirits were untrammeled by the body, and they gazed upon ideal beauty, when, as Plato says, they saw a vision and were initiated into the most blessed mysteries … beholding apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy as in a mystery; shining in pure light, pure themselves and not yet enshrined in the living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, as in an oyster shell. [Footnote:Phaedrus, 250.]
For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is." [Footnote:Ibid., 249.]
If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: SeePrince Athanase. For Matthew Arnold's views, seeSelf Deception.] Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as theOde on Immortality. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in verse of other poets. One writer inquires,
Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes,Indeed the product of my heart and brain?[Footnote: Henry Timrod,Sonnet.]
and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul. Another maintains of poetry,
Her touch is a vibration and a lightFrom worlds before and after.[Footnote: Edwin Markham,Poetry. Another recent poem on prenatalinspiration isThe Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born(1919), byDorothea Laurence Mann.]
Perhaps Alice Meynell'sA Song of Derivationsis the most natural and unforced of these verses. She muses:
… Mixed with memories not my ownThe sweet streams throng into my breast.Before this life began to beThe happy songs that wake in meWoke long ago, and far apart.Heavily on this little heartPresses this immortality.
This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations. She continues,
I come from nothing, but from whereCome the undying thoughts I bear?Down through long links of death and birth,From the past poets of the earth,My immortality is there.
Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he attempted to complete Marlowe'sHero and Leander. Chapman tells his brother poets:
I have thought, sometimes, when I have triedTo work his will, the hand that moved my penWas mine and yet—not mine. The bodily maskIs mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleepsWith old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come,Oracular glories, visionary gleams,And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.[Footnote:At the Sign of the Golden Shoe.]
The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's appeal at the beginning ofThe Ring and the Book, that his dead wife shall inspire his poetry.
One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,—a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,—what is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good genius—probably Shakespeare—presiding over him. Swinburne was often called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes:
I do but rave, for it is better thus;Were once thy starry nature given to mine,In the one life which would encircle usMy voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine;Better to bear the far sublimer painOf thought that has not ripened into speech.To hear in silence Truth and Beauty singDivinely to the brain;For thus the poet at the last shall reachHis own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string.[Footnote:Ode to Shelly.]
In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret Steele Anderson,Other People's Wreaths,and John Drinkwater,My Songs.] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She wistfully inquires:
My own best poets, am I one with you?. . . When my joy and pain,My thought and aspiration, like the stopsOf pipe or flute, are absolutely dumbUnless melodious, do you play on me,My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play,Would no sound come? Or is the music mine;As a man's voice or breath is called his own,Inbreathed by the life-breather?
Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naïve dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: SeeOn Lucinda's Tea-table.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It is no wonder that James Thomson, writing versesOn the Death of His Mother, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen from the sty." [Footnote: SeeOn a Report of a Monument to a Late Author.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled hizzie," [Footnote: See theEpistle to Lapraik.] and sets the fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift:
'Twas not much at any timeShe could hitch into a rhyme,Never was the muse sublimeWho has fled.[Footnote:A Poet's Apology.]
Yet one would be wrong in maintaining that the genuine poet of to-day feels a slighter dependence upon a spirit of song than did the world's earlier singers. There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped. One doubts if there could be found a poet of merit who would disagree with Shelley's description of poetry as "the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own." [Footnote:Defense of Poetry.]
What is the poet's conception of such a divinity? It varies, of course. There is the occasional belief, just mentioned, in the transmigration of genius, but that goes back, in the end, to the belief that all genius is a memory of pre-existence; that is, dropping (or varying) the myth, that the soul of the poet is not chained to the physical world, but has the power of discerning the things which abide. And this, again, links up with what is perhaps the commonest form of invocation in modern poetry, namely, prayer that God, the spirit of the universe, may inspire the poet. For what does the poet mean when he calls himself the voice of God, but that he is intuitively aware of the eternal verities in the world? Poets who speak in this way ever conceive of God as Shelley did, in what is perhaps the most profoundly sincere invocation of the last century, hisHymn to Intellectual Beauty. All poets are idealists.
There is yet another view of the spirit who inspires poetry, which may seem more characteristic of our poets than are these others. It is expressed in the opening of Shelley'sAlastor, and informs the whole of theOde to the West Wind. It pervades Wordsworth, for if he seldom calls upon his natural environment as muse, he is yet profoundly conscious that his song is an inflowing from the heart of nature. This power has become such a familiar divinity to later singers that they are scarcely aware how great is their dependence upon her. There is nothing artificial or in any sense affected in the modern poet's conviction that in walking out to meet nature he is, in fact, going to the source of poetic power. Perhaps nineteenth and twentieth century writers, with their trust in the power of nature to breathe song into their hearts, are closer to the original faith in the muses than most of the poets who have called the sisters by name during the intervening centuries. This deification of nature, like the other modern conceptions of the spirit of song, signifies the poet's need of bringing himself into harmony with the world-spirit, which moulds the otherwise chaotic universe into those forms of harmony and beauty which constitute poetry.
Whether the poet ascribes his infilling to a specific goddess of song or to a mysterious harmony between his soul and the world spirit, a coming "into tune with the infinite," as it has been called, the mode of his communion is identical. There is a frenzy of desire so intolerable that it suddenly fails, leaving the poet in trancelike passivity while the revelation is given to him,—ancient and modern writers alike describe the experience thus. And modern poets, no less than ancient ones, feel that, before becoming the channel of world meaning, they must be deprived of their own petty, egocentric thoughts. So Keats avers of the singer,
One hour, half-idiot, he stands by mossy waterfall;The next he writes his soul's memorial.[Footnote:A Visit to Burns' Country.]
So Shelley describes the experience:
Meaning on his vacant mindFlashed like strong inspiration.[Footnote:Alastor.]
The poet is not, he himself avers, merely thinking about things. He becomes one with them. In this sense all poets are pantheists, and the flash of their inspiration means the death of their personal thought, enabling them, like Lucy, to be
Rolled round in earth's diurnal courseWith rocks and stones and trees.
Hence the singer has always been called a madman. The modern writer cannot escape Plato's conclusion,
There is no invention in him (the poet) until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. [Footnote:Ion, §534.]
And again,
There is a … kind of madness which is a possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other numbers…. But he who, not being inspired, and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art, he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman. [Footnote:Phaedrus, § 245.]
Even Aristotle, that sanest of philosophers, so far agrees with Plato as to say,
Poetry implies either a happy gift of nature, or a strain of madness. In the one case, a man can take the mold of any character; in the other he is lifted out of his proper self. [Footnote:Poetics, XVII.]
One must admit that poets nowadays are not always so frank as earlier ones in describing their state of mind. Now that the lunatic is no longer placed in the temple, but in the hospital, the popular imputation of insanity to the poet is not always favorably received. Occasionally he regards it as only another unjust charge brought against him by a hostile world. Thus a brother poet has said that George Meredith's lot was
Like Lear's—for he had felt the stingOf all too greatly givingThe kingdom of his mind to thoseWho for it deemed him mad.[Footnote: Cale Young Rice,Meredith.]
In so far as the world's pronouncement is based upon the oracles to which the poet gives utterance, he always repudiates the charge of madness. Such various poets as Jean Ingelow, [Footnote: SeeGladys and Her Island.] James Thomson, B. V., [Footnote: SeeTasso to Leonora.] Helen Hunt Jackson, [Footnote: SeeThe Singer's Hills.] Alice Gary, [Footnote: SeeGenius.] and George Edward Woodberry, [Footnote: SeeHe Ate the Laurel and is Mad.] concur in the judgment that the poet is called insane by the rabble simply because they are blind to the ideal world in which he lives. Like the cave-dwellers of Plato's myth, men resent it when the seer, be he prophet or philosopher, tells them that there are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt of ideal truth. The tone of his poem,Tasso and Leonora, is very gloomy. The Italian poet is shown in prison, reflecting upon his faith in the ideal realms where eternal beauty dwells. He muses,
Yes—as Love is truer farThan all other things; so areLife and Death, the World and TimeMere false shows in some great MimeBy dreadful mystery sublime.
But at the end Tasso's faith is troubled, and he ponders,
For were life no flitting dream,Were things truly what they seem,Were not all this world-scene vastBut a shade in Time's stream glassed;Were the moods we now displayLess phantasmal than the clayIn which our poor spirits cladAct this vision, wild and sad,I must be mad, mad,—how mad!
However, this is aside from the point. The average poet is as firmly convinced as any philosopher that his visions are true. It is only the manner of his inspiration that causes him to doubt his sanity. Not merely is his mind vacant when the spirit of poetry is about to come upon him, but he is deprived of his judgment, so that he does not understand his own experiences during ecstasy. The idea of verbal inspiration, which used to be so popular in Biblical criticism, has been applied to the works of all poets. [Footnote: SeeKathrina, by J. G. Holland, where the heroine maintains that the inspiration of modern poets is similar to that of the Old Testament prophets, and declares,
As for the old seersWhose eyes God touched with vision of the lifeOf the unfolding ages, I must doubtWhether they comprehended what they saw.]
Such a view has been a boon to literary critics. Shakespeare commentators, in particular, have been duly grateful for the lee-way granted them, when they are relieved from the necessity of limiting Shakespeare's meanings to the confines of his knowledge. As for the poet's own sense of his incomprehension, Francis Thompson's words are typical. Addressing a little child, he wonders at the statements she makes, ignorant of their significance; then he reflects,
And ah, we poets, I misdoubtAre little more than thou.We speak a lesson taught, we know not how,And what it is that from us flowsThe hearer better than the utterer knows.[Footnote:Sister Songs.]
One might think that the poet would take pains to differentiate this inspired madness from the diseased mind of the ordinary lunatic. But as a matter of fact, bards who were literally insane have attracted much attention from their brothers. [Footnote: At the beginning of the romantic period not only Blake and Cowper, but Christopher Smart, John Clare, Thomas Dermody, John Tannahill and Thomas Lovell Beddoes made the mad poet familiar.] Of these, Tasso [Footnote: SeeSong for Tasso, Shelley;Tasso to Leonora, James Thomson, B. V.,Tasso to Leonora, E. F. Hoffman.] and Cowper [Footnote: See Bowles,The Harp and Despair of Cowper; Mrs. Browning,Cowper's Grave; Lord Houghton,On Cowper's Cottage at Olney.] have appeared most often in the verse of the last century. Cowper's inclusion among his poems of verses written during periods of actual insanity has seemed to indicate that poetic madness is not merely a figure of speech. There is also significance, as revealing the poet's attitude toward insanity, in the fact that several fictional poets are represented as insane. Crabbe and Shelley have ascribed madness to their poet-heroes, [Footnote: See Crabbe,The Patron; Shelley,Rosalind and Helen.] while the American, J. G. Holland, represents his hero's genius as a consequence, in part, at least, of a hereditary strain of suicidal insanity. [Footnote: See J. G. Holland,Kathrina. For recent verse on the mad poet see William Rose Benét,Mad Blake; Amy Lowell,Clear, With Light Variable Winds; Cale Young Rice,The Mad Philosopher; Edmund Blunden,Clare's Ghost.]
It goes without saying that this is a romantic conception, wholly incompatible with the eighteenth century belief that poetry is produced by the action of the intelligence, aided by good taste. Think of the mad poet, William Blake, assuring his sedate contemporaries,
All pictures that's painted with sense and with thoughtAre painted by madmen as sure as a groat.[Footnote: See fragment CI.]
What chance did he have of recognition?
This is merely indicative of the endless quarrel between the inspired poet and the man of reason. The eighteenth century contempt for poetic madness finds typical expression in Pope's satirical lines,
Some demon stole my pen (forgive the offense)And once betrayed me into common sense.[Footnote:Dunciad.]
And it is answered by Burns' characterization of writers depending upon dry reason alone:
A set o' dull, conceited hashesConfuse their brains in college classes!They gang in sticks and come out asses,Plain truth to speak,And syne they think to climb ParnassusBy dint of Greek.[Footnote:Epistle to Lapraik.]
The feud was perhaps at its bitterest between the eighteenth century classicists and such poets as Wordsworth [Footnote: See thePrelude.] and Burns, but it is by no means stilled at present. Yeats [Footnote: SeeThe Scholar.] and Vachel Lindsay [Footnote: SeeThe Master of the Dance. The hero is a dunce in school.] have written poetry showing the persistence of the quarrel. Though the acrimony of the disputants varies, accordingly as the tone of the poet is predominantly thoughtful or emotional, one does not find any poet of the last century who denies the superiority of poetic intuition to scholarship. Thus Tennyson warns the man of learning that he cannot hope to fathom the depths of the poet's mind. [Footnote: SeeThe Poet's Mind.] So Richard Gilder maintains of the singer,
He was too wiseEither to fear, or follow, or despiseWhom men call science—for he knew full wellAll she had told, or still might live to tellWas known to him before her very birth.[Footnote:The Poet's Fame. In the same spirit isInvitation, by J.E. Flecker.]
The foundation of the poet's superiority is, of course, his claim that his inspiration gives him mystical experience of the things which the scholar can only remotely speculate about. Therefore Percy Mackaye makes Sappho vaunt over the philosopher, Pittacus:
Yours is the living pall,The aloof and frozen place of listenersAnd lookers-on at life. But mine—ah! MineThe fount of life itself, the burning fountPierian. I pity you.[Footnote:Sappho and Phaon, a drama.]
Very likely Pittacus had no answer to Sappho's boast, but when the average nondescript verse-writer claims that his intuitions are infinitely superior to the results of scholarly research, the man of reason is not apt to keep still. And one feels that the poet, in many cases, has earned such a retort as that recorded by Young:
How proud the poet's billow swells!The God! the God! his boast:A boast how vain! what wrecks abound!Dead bards stench every coast.[Footnote:Resignation.]
There could be no more telling blow against the poet's view of inspiration than this. Even so pronounced a romanticist as Mrs. Browning is obliged to admit that the poet cannot always trust his vision. She muses over the title of poet:
The nameIs royal, and to sign it like a queenIs what I dare not—though some royal bloodWould seem to tingle in me now and thenWith sense of power and ache,—with imposthumesAnd manias usual to the race. HowbeitI dare not: 'tis too easy to go madAnd ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;The thing's too common.[Footnote:Aurora Leigh. See also the lines in the same poem,For me, I wroteFalse poems, like the rest, and thought them trueBecause myself was true in writing them.]
Has the poet, then, no guarantee for the genuineness of his inspiration? Must he wait as ignorantly as his contemporaries for the judgment of posterity? One cannot conceive of the grandly egoistic poet saying this. Yet the enthusiast must not believe every spirit, but try them whether they be of God. What is his proof?
Emerson suggests a test, in a poem by that name. He avers,
I hung my verses in the wind.Time and tide their faults may find.All were winnowed through and through:Five lines lasted sound and true;Five were smelted in a potThan the south more fierce and hot.[Footnote:The Test.]
The last lines indicate, do they not, that the depth of the poet's passion during inspiration corresponds with the judgment pronounced by time upon his verses? William Blake quaintly tells us that he was once troubled over this question of the artist's infallibility, and that on a certain occasion when he was dining with the prophet Elijah, he inquired, "Does a firm belief that a thing is so make it so?" To which Elijah gave the comforting reply, "Every poet is convinced that it does." [Footnote:The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "A Memorable Fancy."] To the cold critic, such an answer as Emerson's and Blake's is doubtless unsatisfactory, but to the poet, as to the religious enthusiast, his own ecstasy is an all-sufficient evidence.
The thoroughgoing romanticist will accept no other test. The critic of the Johnsonian tradition may urge him to gauge the worth of his impulse by its seemliness and restraint, but the romantic poet's utter surrender to a power from on high makes unrestraint seem a virtue to him. So with the critic's suggestion that the words coming to the poet in his season of madness be made to square with his returning reason. Emerson quotes, and partially accepts the dictum, "Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something more." [Footnote: See the essay onImagination.] But the poet is more apt to account for his belief in his visions by Tertullian's motto,Credo quod absurdum.
If overwhelming passion is an absolute test of true inspiration, whence arises the uncertainty and confusion in the poet's own mind, concerning matters poetical? Why is a writer so stupid as to include one hundred pages of trash in the same volume with his one inspired poem? The answer seems to be that no writer is guided solely by inspiration. Not that he ever consciously falsifies or modifies the revelation given him in his moment of inspiration, but the revelation is ever hauntingly incomplete.
The slightest adverse influence may jar upon the harmony between the poet's soul and the spirit of poetry. The stories of Dante's "certain men of business," who interrupted his drawing of Beatrice, and of Coleridge's visitors who broke in upon the writing ofKubla Khan, are notorious. Tennyson, inThe Poet's Mind, warns all intruders away from the singer's inspired hour. He tells them,
In your eye there is death;There is frost in your breathWhich would blight the plants.* * * * *In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants;It would fall to the ground if you came in.
But it is not fair always to lay the shattering of the poet's dream to an intruder. The poet himself cannot account for its departure, so delicate and evanescent is it. Emerson says,
There are open hoursWhen the God's will sallies free,And the dull idiot might seeThe flowing fortunes of a thousand years;—Sudden, at unawares,Self-moved, fly to the doors,Nor sword of angels could revealWhat they conceal.[Footnote:Merlin.]
What is the poet, thus shut out of Paradise, to do? He can only make a frenzied effort to record his vision before its very memory has faded from him. Benvenuto Cellini has told us of his tantrums while he was finishing his bronze statue of Perseus. He worked with such fury, he declares, that his workmen believed him to be no man, but a devil. But the poet, no less than the molder of bronze, is under the necessity of casting his work into shape before the metal cools. And his success is never complete. Shelley writes, "When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet." [Footnote:The Defense of Poetry.]
Hence may arise the pet theory of certain modern poets, that a long poem is an impossibility. Short swallow flights of song only can be wholly sincere, they say, for their ideal is a poem as literally spontaneous as Sordello's song of Elys. In proportion as work is labored, it is felt to be dead.
There is no lack of verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' composition. See also, Bayard Taylor,Ad Amicos, andProem Dedicatory; Edward Dowden,The Singer's Plea; Richard Gilder,How to the Singer Comes the Song; Joaquin Miller,Because the Skies are Blue; Emerson,The Poet; Longfellow,Envoi; Robert Bridges,A Song of My Heart.] but is there nothing to be said on the other side? Let us reread Browning's judgment on the matter:
Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke.Soil so quick receptive,—not one feather-seed,Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awokeVitalizing virtue: song would song succeedSudden as spontaneous—prove a poet soul!Indeed?Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare:Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rageVainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there:Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after-ageKnows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.[Footnote:Epilogue to the Dramatic Idyls. The same thought is inthe sonnet, "I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap," by JamesRussell Lowell, andOvernight, a Rose, by Caroline Giltiman.]
Is it possible that the one epic poem which is a man's life work may be as truly inspired as is the lyric that leaps to his lips with a sudden gush of emotion? Or is it true, as Shelley seems to aver that such a poem is never an ideal unity, but a collection of inspired lines and phrases connected "by the intertexture of conventional phrases?" [Footnote:The Defense of Poetry.]
It may be that the latter view seems truer to us only because we misunderstand the manner in which inspiration is limited. Possibly poets bewail the incompleteness of the flash which is revealed to them, not because they failed to see all the glories of heaven and earth, but because it was a vision merely, and the key to its expression in words was not given them. "Passion and expression are beauty itself," says William Blake, and the passion, so far from making expression inevitable and spontaneous, may by its intensity be an actual handicap, putting the poet into the state "of some fierce thing replete with too much rage."
Surely we have no right to condemn the poet because a perfect expression of his thought is not immediately forthcoming. Like any other artist, he works with tools, and is handicapped by their inadequacy. According to Plato, language affords the poet a more flexible implement than any other artist possesses, [Footnote: SeeThe Republic, IX, 588 D.] yet, at times, it appears to the maker stubborn enough. To quote Francis Thompson,
Our untempered speech descends—poor heirs!Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick-layers;Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,Strong but to damn, not memorize a spirit![Footnote:Her Portrait.]
Walt Whitman voices the same complaint:
Speech is the twin of my vision: it is unequal to measure itself;It provokes me forever; it says sarcastically,"Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?"[Footnote:Song of Myself.]
Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson,In Memoriam, "For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes,To my Readers; Mrs. Browning,The Soul's Expression; Jean Ingelow,A Lily and a Lute; Coventry Patmore,Dead Language; Swinburne,The Lute and the Lyre, Plus Intra; Francis Thompson,Daphne; Joaquin Miller,Ina; Richard Gilder,Art and Life; Alice Meynell,Singers to Come; Edward Dowden,Unuttered; Max Ehrmann,Tell Me; Alfred Noyes,The Sculptor; William Rose Benét,Thwarted Utterance; Robert Silliman Hillyer,Even as Love Grows More; Daniel Henderson,Lover and Lyre; Dorothea Lawrence Mann,To Imagination; John Hall Wheelock,Rossetti; Sara Teasdale,The Net; Lawrence Binyon,If I Could Sing the Song of Her.]
Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is significant that the singers who are most aware of their inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the problem for us. She avers,
I found the phrase to every thoughtI ever had, but one;And that defies me,—as a handDid try to chalk the sun.
To races nurtured in the dark;—How would your own begin?Can blaze be done in cochineal,Or noon in mazarin?
"To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote:Essay on Imagination.]
Here is the point where poets of the last one hundred years have most often joined issues. As writers of the eighteenth century split on the question whether poetry is the product of the human reason, or of a divine visitation, literal "inspiration," so poets of the nineteenth century and of our time have been divided as to the propriety of adapting one's inspiration to the limitations of one's hearers. It too frequently happens that the poet goes to one extreme or the other. He may either despise his audience to such a degree that he does not attempt to make himself intelligible, or he may quench the spark of his thought in the effort to trim his verse into a shape that pleases his public.
Austin Dobson takes malicious pleasure, often, in championing the less aristocratic side of the controversy. HisAdvice to a Poetfollows, throughout, the tenor of the first stanza:
My counsel to the budding bardIs, "Don't be long," and "Don't be hard."Your "gentle public," my good friend,Won't read what they can't comprehend.
This precipitates us at once into the marts of the money changers, and one shrinks back in distaste. If this is what is meant by keeping one's audience in mind during composition, the true poet will have none of it. Poe's account of his deliberate composition of theRavenis enough to estrange him from the poetic brotherhood. Yet we are face to face with an issue that we, as the "gentle reader," cannot ignore. Shall the poet, then, inshrine his visions as William Blake did, for his own delight, and leave us unenlightened by his apocalypse?
There is a middle ground, and most poets have taken it. For in the intervals of his inspiration the poet himself becomes, as has been reiterated, a mere man, and except for the memories of happier moments that abide with him, he is as dull as his reader. So when he labors to make his inspiration articulate he is not coldly manipulating his materials, like a pedagogue endeavoring to drive home a lesson, but for his own future delight he is making the spirit of beauty incarnate. And he will spare no pains to this end. Keats cries,
O for ten years, that I may overwhelmMyself in poesy; so I may do the deedMy soul has to herself decreed.[Footnote:Sleep and Poetry. See also the letter to his brotherGeorge, April, 1817.]
Bryant warns the poet,
Deem not the framing of a deathless layThe pastime of a drowsy summer day;But gather all thy powersAnd wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave.[Footnote:The Poet.]
It is true that not all poets agree that these years of labor are of avail. Even Bryant, just quoted, warns the poet,
Touch the crude line with fearBut in the moments of impassioned thought.[Footnote:The Poet.]
Indeed the singer's awe of the mysterious revelation given him may be so deep that he dares not tamper with his first impetuous transcription of it. But as a sculptor toils over a single vein till it is perfect, the poet may linger over a word or phrase, and so long as the pulse seems to beat beneath his fingers, no one has a right to accuse him of artificiality. Sometimes, indeed, he is awkward, and when he tries to wreathe his thoughts together, they wither like field flowers under his hot touch. Or, in his zeal, he may fashion for his forms an embroidered robe of such richness that like heavy brocade it disguises the form which it should express. In fact, poets are apt to have an affection, not merely for their inspiration, but for the words that clothe it. Keats confessed, "I look upon fine phrases as a lover." Tennyson delighted in "jewels fine words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle forever." Rossetti spoke no less sincerely than these others, no doubt, even though he did not illustrate the efficacy of his search, when he described his interest in reading old manuscripts with the hope of "pitching on some stunning words for poetry." Ever and anon there is a rebellion against conscious elaboration in dressing one's thoughts. We are just emerging from one of the noisiest of these. The vers-librists insist that all adornment and disguise be stripped off, and the idea be exhibited in its naked simplicity. The quarrel with more conservative writers comes, not from any disagreement as to the beauty of ideas in the nude, but from a doubt on the part of the conservatives as to whether one can capture ideal beauty without an accurately woven net of words. Nor do the vers-librists prove that they are less concerned with form than are other poets. "The poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet maker," says Amy Lowell. [Footnote: Preface toSword Blades and Poppy Seed.] The disagreement among poets on this point is proving itself to be not so great as some had supposed. The ideal of most singers, did they possess the secret, is to do as Mrs. Browning advises them,
Keep up the fireAnd leave the generous flames to shape themselves.[Footnote:Aurora Leigh.]
Whether the poet toils for years to form a shrine for his thought, or whether his awe forbids him to touch his first unconscious formulation of it, there comes a time when all that he can do has been done, and he realizes that he will never approximate his vision more closely than this. Then, indeed, as high as was his rapture during the moment of revelation, so deep is likely to be his discouragement with his powers of creation, for, however fair he may feel his poem to be, it yet does not fill the place of what he has lost. Thus Francis Thompson sighs over the poet,
When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead,And though he cherishethThe babe most strangely born from out her death,Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe,It is not she.[Footnote:Sister Songs.]
We have called the poet an egotist, and surely, his attitude toward the blind rout who have had no glimpse of the heavenly vision, is one of contemptuous superiority. But like the priest in the temple, all his arrogance vanishes when he ceases to harangue the congregation, and goes into the secret place to worship. And toward anyone who sincerely seeks the revelation, no matter how feeble his powers may be, the poet's attitude is one of tenderest sympathy and comradeship. Alice Gary pleads,
Hear me tellHow much my will transcends my feeble powers,As one with blind eyes feeling out in flowersTheir tender hues.[Footnote:To the Spirit of Song.]
And there is not a poet in the last century of such prominence that he does not reverence such a confession, [Footnote: Some poems showing the similarity in such an attitude of great and small alike, follow:Epistle to Charles C. Clarke, Keats;The Soul's Expression, Mrs. Browning;Memorial Verses to Wm. B. Scott, Swinburne;Sister Songs,Proemion to Love in Dian's Lap,A Judgment in Heaven, Francis Thompson;Urania, Matthew Arnold;There Have Been Vast Displays of Critic Wit, Alexander Smith;Invita MinervaandL'Envoi to the Muse, J. R. Lowell;The Voiceless, O. W. Holmes;Fata Morgana, andEpimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought, Longfellow;L'Envoi, Kipling;The Apology, andGleam on Me, Fair Ideal, Lewis Morris;Dedication to Austin Dobson, E. Gosse;A Country Nosegay, andGleaners of Fame, Alfred Austin;Another Tattered Rhymster in the Ring, G. K. Chesterton;To Any Poet, Alice Meynell;The Singer, andTo a Lady on Chiding Me For Not Writing, Richard Realf;The Will and the WingandThough Dowered with Instincts Keen and High, P. H. Haynes;Dull Words, Trumbull Stickney;The Inner Passion, Alfred Noyes;The Veiled Muse, William Winter;Sonnet, William Bennett;Tell Me, Max Ehrmann;The Singer's Plea, Edward Dowden;Genius, R. H. Home;My Country, George Woodberry;Uncalled, Madison Cawein; Thomas Bailey Aldrich,At the Funeral of a Minor Poet; Robert Haven Schauffler,Overtones, The Silent Singers; Stephen Vincent Benét,A Minor Poet; Alec de Candole,The Poets.] and aver that he too is an earnest and humble suppliant in the temple of beauty. For the clearer his glimpse of the transcendent vision has been, the more conscious he is of his blindness after the glory has passed, and the more unquenchable is his desire for a new and fuller revelation.
If English poets of the last century are more inclined to parade their moral virtue than are poets of other countries, this may be the result of a singular persistency on the part of England in searching out and punishing sins ascribed to poetic temperament. Byron was banished; Shelley was judged unfit to rear his own children; Keats was advertised as an example of "extreme moral depravity"; [Footnote: ByBlackwoods.] Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; Swinburne was castigated as "an unclean fiery imp from the pit." [Footnote: ByThe Saturday Review.] These are some of the most conspicuous examples of a refusal by the British public to countenance what it considers a code of morals peculiar to poets. It is hardly to be wondered at that verse-writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have not been inclined to quarrel with Sir Philip Sidney's statement that "England is the stepmother of poets," [Footnote:Apology for Poetry.] and that through their writings should run a vein of aggrieved protest against an unfair discrimination in dragging their failings ruthlessly out to the light.
It cannot, however, be maintained that England is unique in her prejudice against poetic morals. The charges against the artist have been long in existence, and have been formulated and reformulated in many countries. In fact Greece, rather than England, might with some justice be regarded as the parent of the poet's maligners, for Plato has been largely responsible for the hue and cry against the poet throughout the last two millennia. Various as are the counts against the poet's conduct, they may all be included under the declaration in theRepublic, "Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." [Footnote: Book X, 606, Jowett translation.]
Though the accusers of the poet are agreed that the predominance of passion in his nature is the cause of his depravity, still they are a heterogeneous company, suffering the most violent disagreement among themselves as to a valid reason for pronouncing his passionate impulses criminal. Their unfortunate victim is beset from so many directions that he is sorely put to it to defend himself against one band of assailants without exposing himself to attack from another quarter.
This hostile public may be roughly divided into three camps, made up, respectively, of philistines, philosophers, and puritans. Within recent years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a formal denunciation of the artist's morals.
There is, first, that notorious indictment,Degeneration, by Max Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention. Secondly, there is a severe criticism of the poet from an ostensibly unbiased point of view,The Man of Genius, by Césare Lombroso. Herein are presented the arguments of the thinkers, who probe the poet's foibles with an impersonal and scientific curiosity. Last, there is the severe arraignment,What Is Art?by Tolstoi. In this book are crystallized the convictions of the ascetics, who recognize in beauty a false goddess, luring men from the stern pursuit of holiness.
How does it come about that, in affirming the perniciousness of the poet's passionate temperament, the man of the street, the philosopher, and the puritan are for the nonce in agreement? The man of the street is not averse to feeling, as a rule, even when it is carried to egregious lengths of sentimentality. A stroll through a village when all the victrolas are in operation would settle this point unequivocally for any doubter. It seems that the philistine's quarrel with the poet arises from the fact that, unlike the makers of phonograph records, the poet dares to follow feeling in defiance of public sentiment. Like the conservative that he is, the philistine gloats over the poet's lapses from virtue because, in setting aside mass-feeling as a gauge of right and wrong, and in setting up, instead, his own individual feelings as a rule of conduct, the poet displays an arrogance that deserves a fall. The philosopher, like the philistine, may tolerate feeling within limits. His sole objection to the poet lies in the fact that, far from making emotion the handmaiden of the reason, as the philosopher would do, the poet exalts emotion to a seat above the reason, thus making feeling the supreme arbiter of conduct. The puritan, of course, gives vent to the most bitter hostility of all, for, unlike the philistine and the philosopher, he regards natural feeling as wholly corrupt. Therefore he condemns the poet's indulgence of his passionate nature with equal severity whether he is within or without the popular confines of proper conduct, or whether or not his conduct may be proved reasonable.
Much of the inconsistency in the poet's exhibitions of his moral character may be traced to the fact that he is addressing now one, now another, of his accusers. The sobriety of his arguments with the philosopher has sometimes been interpreted by the man of the street as cowardly side-stepping. On the other hand, the poet's bravado in defying the man of the street might be interpreted by the philosopher as an acknowledgment of imperviousness to reason.
It seems as though the first impulse of the poet were to set his back against the wall and deal with all his antagonists at once, by challenging their right to pry into his private conduct. It is true that certain poets of the last century have believed it beneath their dignity to pay any attention to the insults and persecution of the public. But though a number have maintained an air of stolid indifference so long as the attacks have remained personal, few or none have been content to disregard defamation of a departed singer.
The public cannot maintain, in many instances, that this vicarious indignation arises from a sense of sharing the frailties of the dead poet who is the direct object of attack. Not thus may one account for the generous heat of Whittier, of Richard Watson Gilder, of Robert Browning, of Tennyson, in rebuking the public which itches to make a posthumous investigation of a singer's character. [Footnote: See Whittier,My Namesake; Richard W. Gilder,A Poet's Protest, andDesecration; Robert Browning,House; Tennyson,In Memoriam.] Tennyson affords a most interesting example of sensitiveness with nothing, apparently, to conceal. There are many anecdotes of his morbid shrinking from public curiosity, wholly in key with his cry of abhorrence,
Now the poet cannot dieNor leave his music as of old,But round him ere he scarce be coldBegins the scandal and the cry:Proclaim the faults he would not show,Break lock and seal; betray the trust;Keep nothing sacred; 'tis but justThe many-headed beast should know.
In protesting against the right of the public to judge their conduct, true poets refuse to bring themselves to a level with their accusers by making the easiest retort, that they are made of exactly the same clay as is thehoi polloithat assails them. This sort of recrimination is characteristic of a certain blustering type of claimant for the title of poet, such as Joaquin Miller, a rather disorderly American of the last generation, who dismissed attacks upon the singer with the words,
Yea, he hath sinned. Who hath revealedThat he was more than man or less?[Footnote:BurnsandByron.]
The attitude is also characteristic of another anomalous type which flourished in America fifty years ago, whose verse represents an attempted fusion of emasculated poetry and philistine piety. A writer of this type moralizes impartially over the erring bard and his accusers,
Sin met thy brother everywhere,And is thy brother blamed?From passion, danger, doubt and careHe no exemption claimed.[Footnote: Ebenezer Eliot,Burns.]
But genuine poets refuse to compromise themselves by admitting that they are no better than other men.
They are not averse, however, to pointing out the unfitness of the public to cast the first stone. So unimpeachable a citizen as Longfellow finds even in the notoriously spotted artist, Benvenuto Cellini, an advantage over his maligners because
He is notThat despicable thing, a hypocrite.[Footnote:Michael Angelo.]
Most of the faults charged to them, poets aver, exist solely in the evil minds of their critics. Coleridge goes so far as to expurgate the poetry of William Blake, "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in the readers." [Footnote: Letter to Charles Augustus Tulk, Highgate, Thursday Evening, 1818, p. 684, Vol. II,Letters, ed. E. Hartley Coleridge.]
The nakedness of any frailties which poets may possess, makes it the more contemptible, they feel, for the public to wrap itself in the cloak of hypocrisy before casting stones. The modern poet's weakness for autobiographical revelation leaves no secret corners in his nature in which surreptitious vices may lurk. One might generalize what Keats says of Burns, "We can see horribly clear in the work of such a man his whole life, as if we were God's spies." [Footnote: Sidney Colvin,John Keats, p. 285.] The Rousseau-like nudity of the poet's soul is sometimes put forward as a plea that the public should close its eyes to possible shortcomings. Yet, as a matter of fact, it is precisely in the lack of privacy characterizing the poet's life that his enemies find their justification for concerning themselves with his morality. Since by flaunting his personality in his verse he propagates his faults among his admirers, the public is surely justified in pointing out and denouncing his failings.
Poets cannot logically deny this. To do so, they would have to confess that their inspirations are wholly unaffected by their personalities. But this is, naturally, a very unpopular line of defense. That unhappy worshiper of puritan morals and of the muses, J. G. Holland, does make such a contention, averring,
God finds his mighty wayInto his verse. The dimmest window panesLet in the morning light, and in that lightOur faces shine with kindled sense of GodAnd his unwearied goodness, but the glassGets little good of it; nay, it retainsIts chill and grime beyond the power of lightTo warm or whiten …… The psalmist's soulWas not a fitting place for psalms like hisTo dwell in overlong, while wanting words.[Footnote:Kathrina.]
But the egotism of the average poet precludes this explanation. No more deadly insult could be offered him than forgiveness of his sins on the ground of their unimportance. Far from holding that his personality does not affect his verse, he would have us believe that the sole worth of his poetry lies in its reflection of his unique qualities of soul. Elizabeth Barrett, not Holland, exhibits the typical poetic attitude when she asks Robert Browning, "Is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature,—that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God? It isnottrue, to my mind." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 3, 1845.]
The glass houses in which the poet's accusers may reside really have nothing to do with the question. The immorality of these men is of comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne muses happily over the sins of Villon,
But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire, [Footnote:A Ballad of François Villon.] it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral history from his writings.
Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition.
There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege.
So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound,Tensone.] it is easy to dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. Gosse,Life of Swinburne,p. 162.] What is one to say of a period wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted morality, towers above most of his contemporaries?
Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law.
Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to
Come down and redeem us from virtue,
upon his youthful zest in leaving
The lilies and languors of virtueFor the roses and raptures of vice,
he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse,Life of Swinburne,p. 309.]
So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore:
If on his cheek unholy bloodBurned for one youthful hour,'Twas but the flushing of the budThat bloomed a milk-white flower.[Footnote:After a Lecture on Moore.]
One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, "I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his obligatory feelings did not flower in aChristabelor aKubla Khan.
The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its æsthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic expression.
The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was caught by Browning in a passage ofSordello. The hero, in a momentary reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from vice and exclaims,
Leave untriedVirtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeezeVice, like a biting serpent, from the leesOf life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust,All tyrannies in every shape be thrustUpon this now.
Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a passing impulse in Sordello's life.
The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blasé note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,—the lyrics,Childe HaroldandDon Juan—as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson'sVillanelle of the Poet's Roadis a typical expression of the mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines,
Wine and women and song, Three things garnish our way: Yet is day overlong. Three things render us strong, Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. Yet is day overlong. Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in theJuvenaliaof Tennyson [Footnote: SeePoems of Two Brothers.]and Clough, [Footnote: SeeAn Evening Walk in Spring.] wherein these youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?—Poor, cowardly, miscreated creatures abound—if you could throw genius into their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.]
Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness theEpistle to Lapraik, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, as in the lines,
There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,I like the lassies—Gude forgie me.
But inThe Visionhe accounts for his failings as arising from his artist's temperament. The muse tells him,
I saw thy pulses' maddening play,Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way,And yet the light that led astrayWas light from Heaven.
And inA Bard's Epitaphhe reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time.
Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham,Villon; Swinburne,Burns,A Ballad of François Villon.] At the same time Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey,Verlaine; Swinburne,Ave atque Vale.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded
What expiating agonyMay for him damned to poesyShut in that little sentence be,—What deep austerities of strife,—He lived his life. He lived his life.[Footnote:A Judgment in Heaven.]
Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their charge against the poet,—namely, that he is more susceptible to temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. [Footnote:The Man of Genius.] Nordau points out that the disease is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand temptation.