The Poet's Poet Part 5

Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind:

Think me not unkind and rude That I walk alone in grove and glen; I go to the G.o.d of the wood, To fetch his word to men.

[Footnote: _The Apology_.]

He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet:

Men consort in camp and town, But the poet dwells alone.

[Footnote: _Saadi_.]

Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of the poet's personality:

I have no brothers and no peers And the dearest interferes; When I would spend a lonely day, Sun and moon are in my way.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, even while his heart thirsts for companions.h.i.+p.[Footnote: See John Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, _The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, _My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, _The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J.

Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellows.h.i.+p of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, _Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last century, a.s.serting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet declares:

For me, I'd rather live With this weak human heart and yearning blood, Lonely as G.o.d, than mate with barren souls.

More brave, more beautiful than myself must be The man whom I can truly call my friend.

[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.]

So the poet is limited to the companions.h.i.+p of rare souls, who make up to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, because the affections that most people expend on many human relations.h.i.+ps are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the world's indifference to him, Sh.e.l.ley takes comfort in the a.s.surance of such communion, saying to Mary,

If men must rise and stamp with fury blind On his pure name who loves them--thou and I, Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,-- Two tranquil stars, while clouds are pa.s.sing by, That burn from year to year with inextinguished light.

[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.]

But though pa.s.sion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his loneliness must be, then, in the friends.h.i.+p of unusually gifted and discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal comrades.h.i.+p of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes'

_Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal conditions of comrades.h.i.+p.] But multiple friends.h.i.+ps did not flourish among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such a.s.sumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_.

For more recent manifestation of the same att.i.tude see John Drinkwater, _To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).]

Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friends.h.i.+ps in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friends.h.i.+ps are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friends.h.i.+ps of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:

Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, And cast them into shape some other day; Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.

The intimacy of Sh.e.l.ley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friends.h.i.+p, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel it for Sh.e.l.ley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs.

(Sh.e.l.ley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Sh.o.r.e Watch_, indicate that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which understood him, the friends.h.i.+p has been cut short by death. In fact, the premature close of such friends.h.i.+ps has usually been the occasion for their celebration in verse, from cla.s.sic times onward.

Such friends.h.i.+ps, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Sh.e.l.ley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought."

Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told,

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

Sh.e.l.ley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem he says of himself,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

and describes himself as

companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell.

Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in _The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A Renegade Poet on the Poet:_

He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture, and find a narrow road to d.a.m.nation. Indeed, if the majority of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should ever do as other men.

One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and characterizes himself,

I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, Love their love or mine own love to them teach, A b.a.s.t.a.r.d barred from their inheritance, * * * * *

In antre of this lowly body set, Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.

[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.]

But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable consequence of his genius,--that he

Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foiled searching of mortality.

[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.]

The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, _To Shakespeare_.]

Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second revolution of the egocentric circle.

CHAPTER II

THE MORTAL COIL

If I might dwell where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody,

sighs Poe, and the envious note vibrates in much of modern song. There is an inconsistency in the poet's att.i.tude,--the same inconsistency that lurks in the most poetical of philosophies. Like Plato, the poet sees this world as the veritable body of his love, Beauty,--and yet it is to him a muddy vesture of decay, and he is ever panting for escape from it as from a prison house.

One might think that the poet has less cause for rebellion against the flesh than have other men, inasmuch as the bonds that enthrall feebler spirits seem to have no power upon him. A blind Homer, a mad Ta.s.so, a derelict Villon, an invalid Pope, most wonderful of all--a woman Sappho, suggest that the differences in earthly tabernacles upon which most of us lay stress are negligible to the poet, whose burning genius can consume all fetters of heredity, s.e.x, health, environment and material endowment. Yet in his soberest moments the poet is wont to confess that there are varying degrees in the handicap which genius suffers in the mid-earth life; in fact ever since the romantic movement roused in him an intense curiosity as to his own nature, he has reflected a good deal on the question of what earthly conditions will least cabin and confine his spirit.

Apparently the problem of heredity is too involved to stir him to attempted solution. If to make a gentleman one must begin with his grandfather, surely to make a poet one must begin with the race, and in poems even of such bulk as the _Prelude_ one does not find a complete a.n.a.lysis of the singer's forbears. In only one case do we delve far into a poet's heredity. He who will, may perchance hear Sordello's story told, even from his remote ancestry, but to the untutored reader the only clear point regarding heredity is the fusion in Sordello of the restless energy and ac.u.men of his father, Taurello, with the refinement and sensibility of his mother, Retrude. This is a promising combination, but would it necessarily flower in genius? One doubts it. In _Aurora Leigh_ one might speculate similarly about the spiritual aestheticism of Aurora's Italian mother balanced by the intellectual repose of her English father. Doubtless the Brownings were not working blindly in giving their poets this heredity, yet in both characters we must a.s.sume, if we are to be scientific, that there is a happy combination of qualities derived from more remote ancestors.

The immemorial tradition which Swinburne followed in giving his mythical poet the sun as father and the sea as mother is more illuminating, [Footnote: See _Thala.s.sius_.] since it typifies the union in the poet's nature of the earthly and the heavenly. Whenever heredity is lightly touched upon in poetry it is generally indicated that in the poet's nature there are combined, for the first time, these two powerful strains which, in mysterious fusion, const.i.tute the poetic nature. In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human pa.s.sions, is likely to meet complete otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness.

There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her.

Yet in poetical pictures of the mother the reader seldom finds anything patently explaining genius in her child. The glimpse we have of Ben Jonson's mother is an exception. A twentieth century poet conceives of the woman who was "no churl" as

A tall, gaunt woman, with great burning eyes, And white hair blown back softly from a face Etherially fierce, as might have looked Ca.s.sandra in old age.

[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force.

Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers.

[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, _The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D.

Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.]

The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said to the little Viola,