Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each expression of his theories.
In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, [Footnote: SeeEdmund Shore,Villars.] Praed [Footnote: SeeThe Talented Man,To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry.] and Landor. [Footnote: SeeFew Poets Beckon,Apology for Gebir.] Later, when the wave of Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, inMichael Angelo.] Protest against the group of decadents who flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus:
There will be fools that in the name of artWill wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall,I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heardFrom earth, the murmur of those golden hoovesFar, far above them.[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,At the Sign of the Golden Shoe. See alsoRichard Le Gallienne,The Decadent to his Soul,Proem to theReader in English Poems; Joyce Kilmer,A Ballad of New Sins.]
Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth century this mode of passing judgment was most naïvely manifest in verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.]
It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his protégé, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of their poetical wares.
Since a claim for the insunderability of virtue and genius seems to lead one to unfortunate conclusions, it has been rashly conceded in certain quarters that the virtue of a great poet may have no immediate connection with his poetic gift. It is conceived by a few nervously moral poets that morality and art dwell in separate spheres, and that the first transcends the second. Tennyson started a fashion for viewing the two excellences as distinct, comparing them, inIn Memoriam:
Loveliness of perfect deeds,More strong than all poetic thought,
and his disciples have continued to speak in this strain. This is the tenor, for instance, of Jean Ingelow'sLetters of Life and Morning, in which she exhorts the young poet,
Learn to sing,But first in all thy learning, learn to be.
The puritan element in American literary circles, always troubling the conscience of a would-be poet, makes him eager to protest that virtue, not poetry, holds his first allegiance.
He held his manly nameFar dearer than the muse,[Footnote: J. G. Saxe,A Poet's Elegy.]
we are told of one poet-hero. The good Catholic verse of Father Ryan carries a warning of the merely fortuitous connection between poets' talent and their respectability, averring,
They are like angels, but some angels fell.[Footnote:Poets.]
Even Whittier is not sure that poetical excellence is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as virtue, and he writes,
Dimmed and dwarfed, in times like theseThe poet seems beside the man;His life is now his noblest strain.[Footnote:To Bryant on His Birthday.]
When the poet of more firmly grounded conviction attempts to show reason for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay,The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preëminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains plausibility from certain famous artists of history, whose versatility appears to have been unlimited. Longfellow has seized upon this conception of the poet in his drama,Michael Angelo, as has G. L. Raymond in his drama,Dante. In the latter poem the argument for the poet's moral supremacy is baldly set forth.
Artistic sensibility, Dante says, far from excusing moral laxity, binds one to stricter standards of right living. So when Cavalcanti argues in favor of free love,
Your humming birds may sip the sweet they needFrom every flower, and why not humming poets?
Raymond makes Dante reply,
The poets are not lesser men, but greater,And so should find unworthy of themselvesA word, a deed, that makes them seem less worthy.
Owing to the growth of specialization in modern life, this argument, despite Carlyle, has not attained much popularity. Even in idealized fictions of the poet, it is not often maintained that he is equally proficient in every line of activity. Only one actual poet within our period, William Morris, can be taken as representative of such a type, and he does not afford a strong argument for the poet's distinctive virtue, inasmuch as tradition does not represent him as numbering remarkable saintliness among his numerous gifts.
There is a decided inconsistency, moreover, in claiming unusual strength of will as one of the poet's attributes. The muscular morality resulting from training one's will develops in proportion to one's ability to overthrow one's own unruly impulses. It is almost universally maintained by poets, on the contrary, that their gift depends upon their yielding themselves utterly to every fugitive impulse and emotion. Little modern verse vaunts the poet's stern self-control. George Meredith may cry,
I take the hapOf all my deeds. The wind that fills my sailsPropels, but I am helmsman.[Footnote:Modern Love.]
Henley may thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry than is this one.
Hardly more popular than the superman theory is another argument for the poet's virtue that appears sporadically in verse. It has occurred to a few poets that their virtue is accounted for by the high subject-matter of their work, which exercises an unconscious influence upon their lives. Thus in the eighteenth century Young finds it natural that in Addison, the author ofCato,
Virtues by departed heroes taughtRaise in your soul a pure immortal flame,Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame.[Footnote:Lines to Mr. Addison.]
Middle-class didactic poetry of the Victorian era expresses the same view. Tupper is sure that the true poet will live
With pureness in youth and religion in age.[Footnote:What Is a Poet.]
since he conceives as the function of poetry
To raise and purify the grovelling soul,* * * * *And the whole man with lofty thoughts to fill.[Footnote:Poetry.]
This explanation may account for the piety of a Newman, a Keble, a Charles Wesley, but how can it be stretched to cover the average poet of the last century, whose subject-matter is so largely himself? Conforming his conduct to the theme of his verse would surely be no more efficacious than attempting to lift himself by his own boot straps.
These two occasional arguments leave the real issue untouched. The real ground for the poet's faith in his moral intuitions lies in his subscription to the old Platonic doctrine of the trinity,—the fundamental identity of the good, the true and the beautiful.
There is something in the nature of a practical joke in the facility with which Plato's bitter enemies, the poets, have fitted to themselves his superlative praise of the philosopher's virtue. [Footnote: See theRepublic, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in this guise it has an irresistible charm which it cannot hold even for the philosopher.
Poets' convictions on this point have remained essentially unchanged throughout the history of poetry. Granted that there has been a strain of deliberate perversity running through its course, cropping out in the erotic excesses of the late-classic period, springing up anew in one phase of the Italian renaissance, transplanted to France and England, where it appeared at the time of the English restoration, growing again in France at the time of the literary revolution, thence spreading across the channel into England again. Yet this is a minor current. The only serious view of the poet's moral nature is that nurtured by the Platonism of every age. Milton gave it the formulation most familiar to English ears, but Milton by no means originated it. Not only from his Greek studies, but from his knowledge of contemporary Italian æsthetics, he derived the idea of the harmony between the poet's life and his creations which led him to maintain that it is the poet's privilege to make of his own life a true poem.
"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry,
Tis not inThe harmony of things—this hard decree,This ineradicable taint of sin,This boundless upas, this all-blasting treeWhose root is earth.[Footnote:Childe Harold.]
If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins,Ode on the Poetical Character; John Hughes,Ode on Divine Poetry.] Among the romantic poets, the Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet,
O singing heart, think not of aught save song,Beauty can do no wrong.[Footnote:Song.]
Again one hears of the singer,
Pure must he be;Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hearWhere others hear not; see where others seeWith a dazed vision,[Footnote: Henry Timrod,A Vision of Poesy.]
and again,
To write a poem, a man should be as pureAs frost-flowers.[Footnote: T. L. Harris,Lyrics of the Golden Age.]
Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who
Lived beyond men, and so stoodAdmitted to the brotherhoodOf beauty.[Footnote: Madison Cawein,The Dreamer of Dreams.]
It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all of them look to a single standard to govern them æsthetically and morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises,
Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of sin. [Footnote:The Silent Voices.]
Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their individual charges.
The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the philistine.
The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley indicated this at length inThe Defense of Poetry, and in bothRosalind and HelenandThe Revolt of Islamhe showed his bards offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of the poet-hero inPrince AthanaseShelley tells us,
Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise.What he dared do or think, though men might startHe spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes.
It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning'sAurora Leigh, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry Patmore. In Patmore's poem,Olympus, the bard decides to spend an evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the coarse jests, and flees home to
The milk-soup men call domestic bliss.
Likewise, inThe Angel in the House, the poet follows a most domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after shamefacedly confessing it, he adds,
And ere I slept, on bended kneeI owned myself, with many a tearUnseasonable, disorderly.
But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being
Tall galleons,Out of their very beauty driven to dareThe uncompassed sea, founder in starless night.[Footnote:At the Sign of the Golden Shoe, Alfred Noyes.]
He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public,
My sins they learn by rote,And never miss one; no, no miser of them,* * * * *Avid of foulness, so they hound me outAway from blessing that they prate about,But never saw, and never dreamed upon,And know not how to long for with desire.[Footnote:Marlowe.]
In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in linesOn the Morals ofPoets, warns their detractor,
Bigot, one folly of the man you floutIs more to God than thy lean life is whole.
If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie'sThe Minstrel, suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize evil motives when they are face to face with them.
Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: SeeA Vision of Poets.] Swinburne [Footnote: SeeA New Year's Ode.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: SeeSister Songs.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley,
The curse of CainLight on his head who pierced thy innocent breastAnd scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest.
Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes ofRosalind and Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, EpipsychidionandPrince Athanase, share the disposition of the last-named one:
Naught of ill his heart could understand,But pity and wild sorrow for the same.
It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting glimpses of Shelley inSordello, and to have acknowledged them in his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven. Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the saint's white purity," being
A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong,* * * * *With heavenly inspiration, too divineFor souls besotted with earth's sensual wine.[Footnote:Shelley.]
Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission.
Aside from Shelley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently chosen to illustrate the world's proneness to take advantage of the poet's innocence. In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe,The Death of Marlowe, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye. In the drama by Josephine Preston Peabody, the persecutions of hypocritical puritans hound Marlowe to his death. [Footnote:Marlowe.]
The most representative view of Marlowe as an innocent, deceived youth is that presented by Alfred Noyes, inAt the Sign of the Golden Shoe. In this poem we find Nash describing to the Mermaid group thetragic end of Marlowe, who lies
Dead like a dog in a drunken brawl,Dead for a phial of paint, a taffeta gown.
While there float in from the street, at intervals, the cries of the ballad-mongers hawking their latest doggerel,
Blaspheming Tamborlin must die,And Faustus meet his end;Repent, repent, or presentlyTo hell you must descend,
Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringinghis possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also,All unshielded, all unarmed,A child's heart, packed with splendid hopes and dreams.
His manner,
Untamed, adventurous, but still innocent,
exposed him to the clutches of the underworld. One woman, in particular,
Used all her London tricksTo coney-catch the country greenhorn.
Won by her pathetic account of her virtues and trials Marlowe tried to help her to escape from London-then, because he was utterly unused to the wiles of women, and was
Simple as all great, elemental things,
when she expressed an infatuation for him, then
In her treacherous eyes,As in dark pools the mirrored stars will gleam,Here did he see his own eternal skies.* * * * *And all that God had meant to wake one dayUnder the Sun of Love, suddenly wokeBy candle-light, and cried, "The Sun, the Sun."
At last, holding him wrapped in her hair, the woman attempted to tantalize him by revealing her promiscuous amours. In a horror of agony and loathing, Marlowe broke away from her. The next day, as Nash was loitering in a group including this woman and her lover, Archer, someone ran in to warn Archer that a man was on his way to kill him. As Marlowe strode into the place, Nash was struck afresh by his beauty:
I saw his face,Pale, innocent, just the clear face of that boyWho walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick,The little cobbler's son. Yet—there I caughtMy only glimpse of how the sun-god looked—
Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that
His were, perchance, the noblest steeds of all,And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawnAbove the world…. Before his handHad learned to quell them, he was dashed to earth.
Minor writers are most impartial in clearing the names of any and all historical artists by such reasoning as this. By negligible American versifiers one too often finds Burns lauded as one whom "such purity inspires," [Footnote: A. S. G.,Burns.] and, more astonishingly, Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, in verse on Byron's death,
His cherub soul has passed to its eclipse,[Footnote: T. H. Chivers,On the Death of Byron.]
this fades into insignificance beside the consolation offered Byron by another writer for his trials in this world,
Peace awaits thee with caressings,Sitting at the feet of Jesus.
Better known poets are likely to admit a streak of imperfection in a few of their number, while maintaining their essential goodness. It is refreshing, after witnessing too much whitewashing of Burns, to find James Russell Lowell bringing Burns down to a level where the attacks of philistines, though unwarranted, are not sacrilegious. Lowell imagines Holy Willie trying to shut Burns out of heaven. He accuses Burns first of irreligion, but St. Paul protests against his exclusion on that ground. At the charges of drunkenness, and of yearning "o'er-warmly toward the lasses," Noah and David come severally to his defense. In the end, Burns' great charity is felt to offset all his failings, and Lowell adds, of poets in general,
These larger hearts must feel the rollsOf stormier-waved temptation;These star-wide souls beneath their polesBear zones of tropic passion.[Footnote:At the Burns Centennial.]
Browning is willing to allow even fictitious artists to be driven into imperfect conduct by the failure of those about them to live up to their standards. For example, Fra Lippo Lippi, disgusted with the barren virtue of the monks, confesses,
I do these wild things in sheer despiteAnd play the fooleries you catch me atIn sheer rage.
But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author assures the philistine public that it is entirely to blame.
If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to him.
The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. Robert Browning devoted a poem,With Francis Furini, to exposing the incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, inThe Poet's Vow, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken determination to retire from the world,
That so my purged, once human heart,From all the human rent,May gather strength to pledge and drinkYour wine of wonderment,While you pardon me all blessinglyThe woe mine Adam sent.
In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts.
No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in their recognition of this fact. InPauline, Browning traces the poet's mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives inSordello.
One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than Browning—Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," [Footnote:Song of Myself.] and then records his zest in throwing himself into all phases of life.
It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet inPauline,
I had resolvedNo age should come on me ere youth was spent,For I would wear myself out,
Omar Khayyam's
While you liveDrink!—for once dead you never shall return,
Swinburne's cry of despair,
Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray with thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death,[Footnote:Hymn to Proserpine.]
show that in a revulsion from the asceticism of the puritan, no less than in a revulsion from the stupidity of the plain man, it may become easy for the poet to carry hiscarpe diemphilosophy very far. His talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to guide aright his
principle of restlessnessThat would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all[Footnote:Pauline.]
The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times. Emerson admits this, telling us, inThe Poet, that although the singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which
Turn his heart from lovely maids,And make the darlings of the earthSwainish, coarse, and nothing worth,
these moments of exaltation pass, and the singer finds himself a mere man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature,
Eager for good, not hating ill;On his tense chords all strokes are felt,The good, the bad, with equal zeal.
It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth'sOde to Dutydoes not altogether embody the aesthetic conception of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She reflected grimly,
Does the road wind uphill all the way?Yes, to the very end!Will the day's journey take the whole long day?From morn till night, my friend.[Footnote:Uphill.]
It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights. Thus in thePreludehe described an unconscious purification of his life by his worship of physical beauty, saying of nature,
If in my youth I have been pure in heart,If, mingling with the world, I am contentWith my own modest pleasures, and have livedWith God and Nature communing, removedFrom little enmities and low desires,The gift is yours.
Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as possible—as puppies and tomtits do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for they have not passed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth'sOde to Duty,
When love is an unerring light,And joy its own felicity.
For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning inSordello,wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted. He resolves,
The world shall bow to me conceiving allMan's life, who see its blisses, great and smallAfar—not tasting any; no machineTo exercise my utmost will is mine,Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceiveWhat I could do, a mastery believeAsserted and established to the throngBy their selected evidence of song,Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seekTo be, I am.
The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion? What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the essential nature of the highest good as is the reason?
There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and the poet who
dares to takeLife's rule from passion craved for passion's sake,[Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth,Not in the Lucid Intervals.]
there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically asserting, "I hold virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the disposition, each afeeling,not a principle." [Footnote:Letter to Charles Dallas,January 21, 1808.]
On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, is governed by reason solely,—that the poetic imagination is a purely intellectual function. [Footnote: See theSouthern Literary Messenger,II, 328, April, 1836.]
The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,—Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their natures.
The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, but exists above it. At least this is the view of Shelley, and Shelley has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings. Therefore, in his preface toThe Revolt of Islamhe says "I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue." in the preface to theCenci,again, he declares, "Imagination is as the immortal God which should take flesh for the redemption of human passion."
The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful. [Footnote:Symposium,§ 204.]
No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches perfect artistry, his life is purified. Shelley is expressing the beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule." [Footnote:The Defense of Poetry.]
Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Shelley precisely. InThe Crystal,Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And inLife and Songhe repeats the same idea:
None of the singers ever yetHas wholly lived his minstrelsy,Or truly sung his true, true thought.
Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: Republic, VI, 507B.]—that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal.
Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in the nature of a farewell to verse writing. InThe Symbol Seduces,"A. E." exclaims,
I leaveFor Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower,For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive;For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower.
But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her ravishing.
This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the preëminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature of the artist is manifest.
There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, assert with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with their interpretation of that word.
As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society.
The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue philosophers.
Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense. But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of philosophy to which he objected, as follows:
To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; togenusandspeciesanddifferentia, into formal classes, under general notions, and with—yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms—a botanic or physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote:Plato and Platonism.]
But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, "The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other the image." [Footnote:The Romantic Movement,p. 129.] That is, to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual.
Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Shelley is the classic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, inQueen Mab. But Shelley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that Shelley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Shelley was scarcely able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Shelley, more truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who declared, "After I had read Voltaire'sPhilosophical Dictionary,I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart." [Footnote: James Gillman,Life of Coleridge, p. 23.]
A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a class, for the curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the reader to assume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons asserts, is the root of which poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of thefin de siècleschool bears close resemblance to cut flowers, already drooping.
It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for poetry which, he feels, is passing away from earth as materialistic views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet,To Science.] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world. "I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about which most men merely prate,—the vanity of the human or temporal life." [Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.]
It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank paper.
One cannot make so sweeping a statement without at once recalling the notable exception, James Thompson, B.V., the blackness of whose atheistic creed makes up the whole substance ofThe City of Dreadful Night. The preacher brings comfort to the tortured men in that poem, with the words,
And now at last authentic word I bringWitnessed by every dead and living thing;Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:There is no God; no fiend with name divineMade us and tortures us; if we must pineIt is to satiate no Being's gall.
But this poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say that his unbelief broke his heart. Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful envy,
He came to the desert of London town,Mirk miles broad;He wandered up and he wandered down,Ever alone with God.[Footnote:William Blake.]
Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the "aesthetic repose."
Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning,
Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwellsHunger that craves immortal bread and wine.[Footnote:Poets.]
Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of the mystic significance of the physical. [Footnote: See, for example, John Masefield,Prayer,andThe Seekers;and William Rose Benét,The Falconer of God.] To cite the most extreme example of a rugged persistence of the spiritual life in the truncated poetry of the present, even Carl Sandburg cannot escape the conclusion that his birds are
Summer-saulting for God's sake.
Only the poet seems to possess the secret of the fusion of sense and spirit in the world. To the average eye sense-objects are opaque, or, at best, transmit only a faint glimmering of an idea. To Dr. Thomas Arnold's mind Wordsworth's concern with the flower which brought "thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears" was ridiculously excessive, since, at most, a flower could be only the accidental cause of great thoughts, a push, as it were, that started into activity ideas which afterward ran on by their own impulsion. Tennyson has indicated, however, that the poetical feeling aroused by a flower is, in its utmost reaches, no more than a recognition of that which actually abides in the flower itself. He muses,
Flower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies;—I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower—but if I could understandWhat you are, root and all and all in all,I should know what God and man is.
By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one. All poetical metaphor is a confession of this fact, for in metaphor the sensuous and the spiritual are conceived as one.
A pantheistic religion is the only one which does not hamper the poet's unconscious and unhampering morality. He refuses to die to this world as Plato's philosopher and the early fathers of the church were urged to do, for it is from the physical world that all his inspiration comes. If he attempts to turn away from it, he is bewildered, as Christina Rossetti was, by a duality in his nature, by
The foolishest fond folly of a heartDivided, neither here nor there at rest,That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth.[Footnote:Later Life,Sonnet 24.]
On the other hand, if he tries to content himself with the merely physical aspects of things, he finds that he cannot crush out of his nature a mysticism quite as intense as that of the most ascetic saint. Only a religion which maintains the all-pervasive oneness of both elements in his nature can wholly satisfy him.
Not infrequently, poets have given this instinctive faith of theirs a conscious formulation. Coleridge, with his indefatigable quest of the unity underlying "the Objective and Subjective," did so. Shelley devoted a large part ofPrometheus Unboundand the conclusion ofAdonaisto his pantheistic views. Wordsworth never wavered in his worship of the sense world which was yet spiritual,
The Being that is in the clouds and air,That is in the green leaves among the groves,[Footnote:Hart Leap Well.]
and was led to the conclusion,
It is my faith that every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.[Footnote:Lines Written in Early Spring.]
Tennyson, despite the restlessness of his speculative temper, was ever returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed inEmpedocles on Ætna,in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's pantheistic faith. Swinburne'sHerthais one of the most thorough going expressions of pantheism. At the present time, as in much of the poetry of the past, the pantheistic feeling is merely implicit. One of the most recent conscious formulations of it is in Le Gallienne'sNatural Religion,wherein he explains the grounds of his faith,
Up through the mystic deeps of sunny airI cried to God, "Oh Father, art thou there?"Sudden the answer like a flute I heard;It was an angel, though it seemed a bird.
On the whole the poet might well wax indignant over the philosopher's charge. It is hardly fair to accuse the poet of being indifferent to the realm of ideas, when, as a matter of fact, he not only tries to establish himself there, but to carry everything else in the universe with him.
The charge of the puritan appears no more just to the poet than that of the philosopher. How can it be true, as the puritan maintains it to be, that the poet lacks the spirit of reverence, when he is constantly incurring the ridicule of the world by the awe with which he regards himself and his creations? No power, poets aver, is stronger to awaken a religious mood than is the quietude of the beauty which they worship. Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated "without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence from this power of revelation.
But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit characteristic of religious reverence.
It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings.
There is no God, O son!If thou be none,[Footnote:On the Downs.]
Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god, any person, any fetish at all. Therefore I might call myself, if I wished, a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Shelley) but assuredly in no sense a theist." [Footnote: Edmund Gosse,Swinburne, p. 309.]
Nothing less than complete fusion of the three worlds spoken of by Goethe, will satisfy the poet. If fusion of the outer world and the other world results in the pantheistic color of the poet's religion, the third element, the inner world, makes it imperative that the poet's divinity should be a personal one, no less, in fact, than a deification of his own nature. This tendency of the poet to create God in his own image is frankly acknowledged by Mrs. Browning in prayer to the "Poet God." [Footnote:A Vision of Poets.]
Of all English writers, William Blake affords the clearest revelation of the poet's instinctive attitude, because he is most courageous in carrying the implications of poetic egotism to their logical conclusion. In theProphetic Books, in particular, Blake boldly expresses all that is implicit in the poet's yearning for a religion which will not humble and thwart his nature, but will exalt and magnify it.
Even the puritan cannot affirm that the poet's demand for recognition, in his religious belief, of every phase of his existence, has not flowered, once, at least, in most genuinely religious poetry, for the puritan himself feels the power of Emily Brontë'sLast Lines,in which she cries with proud and triumphant faith,
Though earth and man were gone,And suns and universes ceased to be,And Thou wert left alone,Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,Nor atom that his might could render void;Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
There remains the plain man to be dealt with. What, he reiterates, has the poet to say for his orthodoxy? If he can combine his poetical illusions about the divinity of nature and the superlative and awesome importance of the poet himself with regular attendance at church; if these phantasies do not prevent him from sincerely and thoughtfully repeating the Apostle's creed, well and good. The plain man's religious demands upon the poet are really not excessive, yet the poet, from the romantic period onward, has taken delight in scandalizing him.
In the eighteenth century poets seem not to have been averse to placating their enemies by publishing their attendance upon the appointed means of grace. Among the more conservative poets, this attitude lasted over into the earlier stages of the romantic movement. So late a poet as Bowles delighted to stress the "churchman's ardor" of the poet. [Footnote: See his verse on Southey and Milton.] Southey also was ready to exhibit his punctilious orthodoxy. Yet poor Southey was the unwitting cause of the impiety of his brothers for many years, inasmuch as Byron'sA Vision of Judgment,with its irresistible satire on Southey, sounded the death-knell of the narrowly religious poet.
The vogue which the poet of religious ill-repute enjoyed during the romantic period was, of course, a very natural phase of "the renaissance of wonder." The religious "correctness" of the eighteenth century inevitably went out of fashion, in poetic circles, along with the rest of its formalism. Poets vied with one another in forming new and daring conceptions of God. There was no question, in the romantic revolt, of yielding to genuine atheism. "The worst of it is that Idobelieve," said Byron, discussing his bravery under fear of death. "Anything but the Church of England," was the attitude by which Byron shocked the orthodox. "I think," he wrote, "people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline myself very much to the Catholic doctrine." [Footnote: Letter to Tom Moore, March 4, 1822. See also the letter to Robert Charles Dallas, January 21, 1808.]Cain,however, is not a piece of Catholic propaganda, and the chief significance of Byron's religious poetry lies in his romantic delight in arraigning the Almighty as well as Episcopalians.
Shelley comes out even more squarely than Byron against conventional religion. InJulian and Maddalo, he causes Byron to say of him,
You were ever stillAmong Christ's flock a perilous infidel.
Shelley helped to foster the tradition, too, that the poet was persecuted by the church. InRosalind and Helen, the hero was hated by the clergy,
For he made verses wild and queerOf the strange creeds priests hold so dear,
and this predilection for making them wild and queer resulted in Lionel's death, for
The ministers of misrule sentSeized on Lionel and boreHis chained limbs to a dreary tower,For he, they said, from his mind had bentAgainst their gods keen blasphemy.
The most notable illustration of this phase of Shelley's thought isThe Revolt of Islam,wherein the poets, Laon and Cythna, are put to death by the priests, who regard them as their worst enemies.
Burns, also, took a certain pleasure in unorthodoxy, and later poets have gloried in his attitude.
Swinburne, in particular, praises his daring, in that he
Smote the God of base men's choiceAt God's own gate.[Footnote:Burns.]
Young poets have not yet lost their taste for religious persecution. It is a great disappointment to them to find it difficult to strike fire from the faithful in these days. Swinburne in his early poetry denounced the orthodox God with such vigor that he roused a momentary flutter of horror in the church, but nowadays the young poet who craves to manifest his spiritual daring is far more likely to find himself in the position of Rupert Brooke, of whom someone has said, "He imagines the poet as going on a magnificent quest to curse God on his throne of fire, and finding—nothing."
The poet's youthful zest in scandalizing the orthodox is likely, however, to be early outgrown. As the difficulties in the way of his finding a God worthy of his adoration become manifest to him, it may be, indeed, with a sigh that he turns from the conventional religion in which so many men find certitude and place. This is the mood, frequently, of Browning, [Footnote: SeeChristmas EveandEaster Day.] of Tennyson, [Footnote: SeeIn Memoriam.] of Arnold, [Footnote: SeeDover Beach.] of Clough. [Footnote: SeeThe New Sinai, Qui Laborat Orat, Hymnos Amnos, Epistrausium.] So, too, James Thomson muses with regret,
How sweet to enter in, to kneel and prayWith all the others whom we love so well!All disbelief and doubt might pass away,And peace float to us with its Sabbath bell.Conscience replies, There is but one good rest,Whose head is pillowed upon Truth's pure breast.[Footnote:The Reclusant.]
In fact, as the religious world grows more broad-minded, the mature poet sometimes appeals to the orthodox for sympathy when his daring religious questing threatens to plunge him into despair. The public is too quick to class him with those whose doubt is owing to lassitude of mind, rather than too eager activity. Tennyson is obliged to remind his contemporaries,
There lives more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Browning, as always, takes a hopeful view of human stupidity when he expresses his belief that men will not long "persist in confounding, any more than God confounds, with genuine infidelity and atheism of the heart those passionate impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love." [Footnote:Prefaceto the Letters of Shelley (afterwards proved spurious).]
The reluctance of the world to give honor too freely to the poet who prefers solitary doubt to common faith is, probably enough, due to a shrewd suspicion that the poet finds religious perplexity a very satisfactory poetic stimulus. In his character as man of religion as in that of lover, the poet is apt to feel that his thirst, not the quenching of it, is the aesthetic experience. There is not much question that since the beginning of the romantic movement, at least, religious doubt has been more prolific of poetry than religious certainty has been. Even Cowper, most orthodox of poets, composed his best religious poetry while he was tortured by doubt. One does not deny that there is good poetry in the hymn books, expressing settled faith, but no one will seriously contend, I suppose, that any contentedly orthodox poet of the last century has given us a body of verse that compares favorably, in purely poetical merit, with that of Arnold.
Against the imputation that he deliberately dallies with doubt, the poet can only reply that, again as in the case of his human loves, longing is strong enough to spur him to poetic achievement, only when it is a thirst driving him mad with its intensity. The poet, in the words of a recent poem, is "homesick after God," and in the period of his blackest doubt beats against the wall of his reason with the cry,
Ah, but there should be one!There should be one. And there's the bitternessOf this unending torture-place for men,For the proud soul that craves a perfectnessThat might outwear the rotting of all thingsRooted in earth.[Footnote: Josephine Preston Peabody,Marlowe.]
The public which refuses to credit the poet with earnestness in his quest of God may misconceive the dignified attempts of Arnold to free himself from the tangle of doubt, and deem his beautiful gestures purposely futile, but before condemning the poetic attitude toward religion it must also take into account the contrary disposition of Browning to kick his way out of difficulties with entire indifference to the greater dignity of an attitude of resignation; and no more than Arnold does Browning ever depict a poet who achieves religious satisfaction. Thus the hero ofPaulinecomes to no triumphant issue, though he maintains,