The Poet's Poet Part 23

Come down and redeem us from virtue,

upon his youthful zest in leaving

The lilies and languors of virtue For the roses and raptures of vice,

he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 309.]

So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore:

If on his cheek unholy blood Burned for one youthful hour, 'Twas but the flushing of the bud That bloomed a milk-white flower.

[Footnote: _After a Lecture on Moore_.]

One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively a.s.serting, "I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his obligatory feelings did not flower in a _Christabel_ or a _Kubla Khan_.

The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its aesthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic expression.

The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it.

He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No l.u.s.t Like to Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth century. A characteristic renaissance att.i.tude toward life and art was caught by Browning in a pa.s.sage of _Sordello_. The hero, in a momentary reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from vice and exclaims,

Leave untried Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, l.u.s.t, All tyrannies in every shape be thrust Upon this now.

Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a pa.s.sing impulse in Sordello's life.

The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blase note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,--the lyrics, _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_--as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's _Villanelle of the Poet's Road_ is a typical expression of the mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines,

Wine and women and song, Three things garnish our way: Yet is day overlong.

Three things render us strong, Vine-leaves, kisses and bay.

Yet is day overlong.

Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover it is useful, they a.s.sert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness.

This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the _Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose."

[Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.]

Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as yearning for holiness, even while his importunate pa.s.sions force him into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the _Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, as in the lines,

There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, I like the la.s.sies--Gude forgie me.

But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his artist's temperament. The muse tells him,

I saw thy pulses' maddening play, Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, And yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven.

And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time.

Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of Francois Villon_.] At the same time Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, _Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded

What expiating agony May for him d.a.m.ned to poesy Shut in that little sentence be,-- What deep austerities of strife,-- He lived his life. He lived his life.

[Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.]

Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, puritans and philosophers alike are p.r.o.ne to turn to such expositions as the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge.

[Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand temptation.

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: See _Edmund Sh.o.r.e_, _Villars_.] Praed [Footnote: See _The Talented Man_, _To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry_.] and Landor. [Footnote: See _Few 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, in _Michael 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 art Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves Far, far above them.

[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_. See also Richard Le Gallienne, _The Decadent to his Soul_, _Proem to the Reader 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sing judgment was most navely 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 protege, 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, in _In 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's _Letters 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 name Far 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 these The poet seems beside the man; His life is now his n.o.blest 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent 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 need From 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 themselves A 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,