The Poet's Poet Part 24

I take the hap Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails Propels, but I am helmsman.

[Footnote: _Modern Love_.]

Henley may thank the G.o.ds 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 of _Cato_,

Virtues by departed heroes taught Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame, Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame.

[Footnote: _Lines to Mr. Addison_.]

Middle-cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 the _Republic_, 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 ravis.h.i.+ng 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-cla.s.sic 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 aesthetics, 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 a.s.sured 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 in The harmony of things--this hard decree, This ineradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree Whose 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 hear Where others hear not; see where others see With a dazed vision, [Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.]

and again,

To write a poem, a man should be as pure As 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 stood Admitted to the brotherhood Of 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 aesthetically 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. Sh.e.l.ley indicated this at length in _The Defense of Poetry_, and in both _Rosalind and Helen_ and _The Revolt of Islam_ he showed his bards offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of the poet-hero in _Prince Athanase_ Sh.e.l.ley tells us,

Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise.

What he dared do or think, though men might start He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes.

It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative verse, the fict.i.tious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's _Aurora 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 s.e.x, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the coa.r.s.e jests, and flees home to

The milk-soup men call domestic bliss.

Likewise, in _The 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 knee I owned myself, with many a tear Unseasonable, 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 dare The uncompa.s.sed 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 out Away 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 lines _On the Morals of Poets_, warns their detractor,

Bigot, one folly of the man you flout Is more to G.o.d 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 gra.s.sy hill and purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's _The 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 circ.u.mstances. 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: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote: See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister 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 n.o.ble 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 Sh.e.l.ley,

The curse of Cain Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest.

Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Sh.e.l.ley. All the poets appearing in Sh.e.l.ley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_, share the disposition of the last-named one: