The Poet's Poet Part 25

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 Sh.e.l.ley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic readers of Sh.e.l.ley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is reminiscent of Sh.e.l.ley. Even a poet so different from him, in many respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Sh.e.l.ley's character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting glimpses of Sh.e.l.ley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in his apostrophe to Sh.e.l.ley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Sh.e.l.ley's abandonment of Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Sh.e.l.ley as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of later poets' notion of Sh.e.l.ley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven.

Sh.e.l.ley, as the most compa.s.sionate 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 divine For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine.

[Footnote: _Sh.e.l.ley_.]

Consequently he is misunderstood and persecuted, and returns to heaven heart-broken by the apparent failure of his mission.

Aside from Sh.e.l.ley, Marlowe is the historical poet most frequently chosen to ill.u.s.trate the world's p.r.o.neness 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 prost.i.tute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted Marlowe's a.s.sociates 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, in _At 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 presently To h.e.l.l you must descend,

Nash tells his story of the country lad who walked to London, bringing his possessions carried on a stick over his shoulder, bringing also, All uns.h.i.+elded, 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 tricks To 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 G.o.d had meant to wake one day Under the Sun of Love, suddenly woke By 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 boy Who walked to Cambridge, with a bundle and stick, The little cobbler's son. Yet--there I caught My only glimpse of how the sun-G.o.d looked--

Mourning for his death, the great dramatists agree that

His were, perchance, the n.o.blest steeds of all, And from their nostrils blew a fierier dawn Above the world.... Before his hand Had 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly, Byron conceived of as a misjudged innocent. If one is surprised to hear, in verse on Byron's death,

His cherub soul has pa.s.sed 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 refres.h.i.+ng, after witnessing too much whitewas.h.i.+ng 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 la.s.ses," 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 rolls Of stormier-waved temptation; These star-wide souls beneath their poles Bear zones of tropic pa.s.sion.

[Footnote: _At the Burns Centennial_.]

Browning is willing to allow even fict.i.tious 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 despite And play the fooleries you catch me at In sheer rage.

But invariably, whatever a poet hero's failings maybe, the author a.s.sures 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, in _The 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 drink Your wine of wonderment, While you pardon me all blessingly The woe mine Adam sent.

In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crus.h.i.+ng 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. In _Pauline_, 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 in _Sordello_.

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 in _Pauline_,

I had resolved No age should come on me ere youth was spent, For I would wear myself out,

Omar Khayyam's

While you live Drink!--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 his _carpe diem_ philosophy very far. His talisman, pure love of beauty, must be indeed unerring if it is to guide aright his

principle of restlessness That would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all [Footnote: _Pauline_.]