The Poet's Poet Part 31

The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,

in favor of attainable "treasures of the jewelled skies" be an offense against truth, it is not, poets would say, because of his non-conformance to the so-called facts of astronomy, but because his sense of beauty is at fault, leading him to prefer prettiness to sublimity. As for the poet's visions, of naiad and dryad, which the philosopher avers are less true than chemical and physical forces, they represent the hidden truth of beauty, which is threaded through the ugly medley of life, being invisible till under the light of the poet's thought it flashes out like a pattern in golden thread, woven through a somber tapestry.

It is only when the poet is not keenly alive to beauty that he begins to fret about making an artificial connection between truth and beauty, or, as he is apt to rename them, between wisdom and fancy. In the eighteenth century when the poet's vision of truth became one with the scientist's, he could not conceive of beauty otherwise than as gaudy ornaments, "fancies," with which he might trim up his thoughts. The befuddled conception lasted over into the romantic period; Beattie [Footnote: See _The Minstrel_.] and Bowles [Footnote: See _The Visionary Boy_.] both warned their poets to include both fancy and wisdom in their poetry.

Even Landor reflected,

A marsh, where only flat leaves lie, And showing but the broken sky Too surely is the sweetest lay That wins the ear and wastes the day Where youthful Fancy pouts alone And lets not wisdom touch her zone.

[Footnote: See _To Wordsworth_.]

But the poet whose sense of beauty is unerring gives no heed to such distinctions.

If the scientist scoffs at the poet's intuitive selection of ideal values, declaring that he might just as well take any other aspect of things--their number, solidarity, edibleness--instead of beauty, for his test of their reality, the poet has his answer ready. After all, this poet, this dreamer, is a pragmatist at heart. To the scientist's charge that his test is absurd, his answer is simply, It works.

The world is coming to acknowledge, little by little, the poet points out, that whatever he presents to it as beauty is likewise truth. "The poet's wish is nature's law," [Footnote: _Poem Outlines_.] says Sidney Lanier, and other poets, no less, a.s.sert that the poet is in unison with nature. Wordsworth calls poetry "a force, like one of nature's."

[Footnote: _The Prelude_.] One of Oscar Wilde's cleverest paradoxes is to the effect that nature imitates art, [Footnote: See the Essay on Criticism.] and in so far as nature is one with human perception, there is no doubt that it is true. "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth," Keats wrote, "whether it existed before or not." [Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.] And again, "The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth."

[Footnote: Letter to B. Baillie, November 17, 1817.]

If the poet's intuitions are false, how does it chance, he inquires, that he has been known, in all periods of the world's history, as a prophet? Sh.e.l.ley says, "Poets are ... the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present," and explains the phenomenon thus: "A poet partic.i.p.ates in the eternal, the infinite, the one; so far as related to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." [Footnote: _A Defense of Poetry_.] In our period, verse dealing with the Scotch bard is fondest of stressing the immemorial a.s.sociation of the poet and the prophet, and in much of this, the "pretense of superst.i.tion" as Sh.e.l.ley calls it, is kept up, that the poet can foretell specific happenings. [Footnote: See, for example, Gray, _The Bard_; Scott, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Thomas the Rhymer_; Campbell, _Lochiel's Warning_.] But we have many poems that express a broader conception of the poet's gift of prophecy.

[Footnote: See William Blake, Introduction to _Songs of Experience_, _Hear the Voice of the Bard_; Crabbe, _The Candidate_; Landor, _Dante_; Barry Cornwall, _The Prophet_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_; Coventry Patmore, _Prophets Who Cannot Sing_; J. R. Lowell, _Ma.s.saccio_, Sonnet XVIII; Owen Meredith, _The Prophet_; W. H. Burleigh, _Sh.e.l.ley_; O. W.

Holmes, _Shakespeare_; T. H. Olivers, _The Poet_, _Dante_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Corner_; Swinburne, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_; Herbert Trench, _Stanzas on Poetry_.] Holmes' view is typical:

We call those poets who are first to mark Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,-- Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark While others only note that day is gone; For them the Lord of light the curtain rent That veils the firmament.

[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.]

Most of these poems account for the premonitions of the poet as Sh.e.l.ley does; as a more recent poet has phrased it:

Strange hints Of things past, present and to come there lie Sealed in the magic pages of that music, Which, laying hold on universal laws, Ranges beyond these mud-walls of the flesh.

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

The poet's defense is not finished when he establishes the truth of his vision. How shall the world be served, he is challenged, even though it be true that the poet's dreams are of reality? Plato demanded of his philosophers that they return to the cave of sense, after they had seen the heavenly vision, and free the slaves there. Is the poet willing to do this? It has been charged that he is not. Browning muses,

Ah, but to find A certain mood enervate such a mind, Counsel it slumber in the solitude Thus reached, nor, stooping, task for mankind's good Its nature just, as life and time accord.

--Too narrow an arena to reward Emprize--the world's occasion worthless since Not absolutely fitted to evince Its mastery!

[Footnote: _Sordello_.]

But one is inclined to question the justice of Browning's charge, at least so far as it applies peculiarly to the poet. Logically, he should devote himself to sense-blinded humanity, not reluctantly, like the philosopher descending to a gloomy cave which is not his natural habitat, but eagerly, since the poet is dependent upon sense as well as spirit for his vision. "This is the privilege of beauty," says Plato, "that, being the loveliest of the ideas, she is also the most palpable to sight." [Footnote: _Phaedrus_.] Accordingly the poet has no horror of physical vision as a bondage, but he is fired with an enthusiasm to make the world of sense a more transparent medium of beauty. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet's humanitarian aspect, see Bowles, _The Visionary Boy_, _On the Death of the Rev. Benwell_; Wordsworth, _The Poet and the Caged Turtle Dove_; Arnold, _Heine's Grave_; George Eliot, _O May I Join the Choir Invisible_; Lewis Morris, _Food Of Song_; George Meredith, _Milton_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; James Thomson, B. V., _Sh.e.l.ley_; Swinburne, _Centenary of Landor_, _Victor Hugo_, _Victor Hugo in 1877_, _Ben Jonson_, _Thomas Decker_; Whittier, _To J. P._, and _The Tent on the Beach_; J. R. Lowell, _To The Memory of Hood_; O. W. Holmes, _At a Meeting of the Burns Club_; Emerson, _Solution_; R. Realf, _Of Liberty and Charity_; W. H. Burleigh, _Sh.e.l.ley_; T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_; Eugene Field, _Poet and King_; C. W. Hubner, _The Poet_; J.

H. West, _O Story Teller Poet_; Gerald Ma.s.sey, _To Hood Who Sang the Song of the Shirt_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Sidney Lanier, _Wagner_, _Clover_; C. A. Pierce, _The Poet's Ideal_; E.

Markham, _The Bard_, _A Comrade Calling Back_, _An April Greeting_; G.

L. Raymond, _A Life in Song_; Richard Gilder, _The City_, _The Dead Poet_; E. L. c.o.x, _The Master_, _Overture_; R. C. Robbins, _Wordsworth_; Carl McDonald, _A Poet's Epitaph_.] It is inevitable that every poet's feeling for the world should be that of Sh.e.l.ley, who says to the spirit of beauty,

Never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery.

[Footnote: _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_.]

For, unlike the philosopher, the poet has never departed from the world of sense, and it is hallowed to him as the incarnation of beauty.

Therefore he is eager to make other men ever more and more transparent embodiments of their true selves, in order that, gazing upon them, the poet may have ever deeper inspiration. This is the central allegory in _Enydmion_, that the poet must learn to help humanity before the mystery of poetship shall be unlocked to him. Browning comments to this effect upon Bordello's unwillingness to meet the world:

But all is changed the moment you descry Mankind as half yourself.

Matthew Arnold is the sternest of modern poets, perhaps, in pointing out the poet's responsibility to humanity:

The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart, Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man.

Though he move mountains, though his day Be pa.s.sed on the proud heights of sway, Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, Though he hath borne immortal pains, Action and suffering though he know, He hath not lived, if he lives so.

[Footnote: _Resignation_.]

It is obvious that in the poet's opinion there is only one means by which he can help humanity, and that is by helping men to express their essential natures; in other words, by setting them free. Liberty is peculiarly the watch-word of the poets. To the philosopher and the moralist, on the contrary, there is no merit in liberty alone. Men must be free before they can seek wisdom or goodness, no doubt, but something beside freedom is needed, they feel, to make men good or evil. But to the poet, beauty and liberty are almost synonymous. If beauty is the heart of the universe (and it must be, the poet argues, since it abides in sense as well as spirit), there is no place for the corrupt will. If men are free, they are expressing their real natures; they are beautiful.

Is this our poet's view? But hear Plato: "The tragic poets, being wise men, will forgive us, and any others who live after our manner, if we do not receive them into our state, because they are the eulogists of tyranny." [Footnote: _Republic._] Few enemies of poets nowadays would go so far as to make a charge like this one, though Thomas Peac.o.c.k, who locked horns with Sh.e.l.ley on the question of poetry, a.s.serted that poets exist only by virtue of their flattery of earth's potentates. [Footnote: See _The Four Ages of Poetry._] Once, it must be confessed, one of the poets themselves brought their name into disrepute. In the heat of his indignation over attacks made upon his friend Southey, Landor was moved to exclaim,

If thou hast ever done amiss It was, O Southey, but in this, That, to redeem the lost estate Of the poor Muse, a man so great Abased his laurels where some Georges stood Knee-deep in sludge and ordure, some in blood.

Was ever genius but thyself Friend or befriended of a Guelf?

But these are insignificant exceptions to the general characterization of the modern poet as liberty-lover.

Probably Plato's equanimity would not be upset, even though we presented to him an overwhelming array of evidence bearing upon the modern poet's allegiance to democracy. Certainly, he might say, the modern poet, like the ancient one, reflects the life about him. At the time of the French revolution, or of the world war, when there is a popular outcry against oppression, what is more likely than that the poet's voice should be the loudest in the throng? But as soon as there is a reaction toward monarchical government, poets will again scramble for the post of poet-laureate.

The modern poet can only repeat that this is false, and that a resume of history proves it. Sh.e.l.ley traces the rise and decadence of poetry during periods of freedom and slavery. He points out, "The period in our history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II, when all the forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue." Gray, in _The Progress of Poesy_, draws the same conclusion as Sh.e.l.ley:

Her track, where'er the G.o.ddess roves, Glory pursue, and generous shame, The unconquerable will, and freedom's holy flame.

Other poets, if they do not base their conclusions upon history, a.s.sert no less positively that every true poet is a lover of freedom.

[Footnote: See Gray, _The Bard_; Burns, _The Vision_; Scott, _The Bard's Incantation_; Moore, _The Minstrel Boy_, _O Blame Not the Bard_, _The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls_, _Shall the Harp then be Silent_, _Dear Harp of My Country_; Wordsworth, _The Brownies' Cell_, _Here Pause_; Tennyson, _Epilogue_, _The Poet_; Swinburne, _Victor Hugo_, _The Centenary of Landor_, _To Catullus_, _The Statue of Victor Hugo_, _To Walt Whitman in America_; Browning, _Sordello_; Barry Cornwall, _Miriam_; Sh.e.l.ley, _To Wordsworth_, _Alastor_, _The Revolt of Islam_, _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, _Prometheus Unbound_; S. T. Coleridge, _Ode to France_; Keats, _Epistle to His Brother George_; Philip Freneau, _To a Writer Who Inscribes Himself a Foe to Tyrants_; J. D. Percival, _The Harper_; J. R. Lowell, _Ode_, _L'Envoi_, Sonnet XVII, _Incident in a Railway Car_, _To the Memory of Hood_; Whittier, _Proem_, _Eliot_, Introduction to _The Tent on the Beach_; Longfellow, _Michael Angelo_; Whitman, _Starting from Paumaak_, _By Blue Ontario's Sh.o.r.e_, _For You_, _O Democracy_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Poet_; W. C. Bryant, _The Poet_; Bayard Taylor, _A Friend's Greeting to Whittier_; Richard Realf, _Of Liberty and Charity_; Henry van d.y.k.e, _Victor Hugo_, _To R. W. Gilder_; Simon Kerl, _Burns_; G. L. Raymond, _Dante_, _A Life in Song; Charles Kent, _Lamartine in February_; Robert Underwood Johnson, _To the Spirit of Byron_, _Shakespeare_; Francis Carlin, _The Dublin Poets_, _MacSweeney the Rhymer_, _The Poetical Saints_; Daniel Henderson, _Joyce Kilmer_, _Alan Seeger_, _Walt Whitman_; Rhys Carpenter, _To Rupert Brooke_; William Ellery Leonard, _As I Listened by the Lilacs_; Eden Phillpotts Swinburne, _The Grave of Landor_.] It is to be expected that in the romantic period poets should be almost unanimous in this view, though even here it is something of a surprise to hear Keats, whose themes are usually so far removed from political life, exclaiming,

Where's the poet? Show him, show him, Muses mine, that I may know him!

'Tis the man who with a man Is an equal, be he king Or poorest of the beggar clan.

[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Wordsworth's devotion to liberty was doubted by some of his brothers, but Wordsworth himself felt that, if he were not a democrat, he would be false to poetry, and he answers his detractors,

Here pause: the poet claims at least this praise, That virtuous Liberty hath been the scope Of his pure song.

In the Victorian period the same view holds. The Brownings were ardent champions of democracy. Mrs. Browning averred that the poet's thirst for ubiquitous beauty accounts for his love of freedom:

Poets (hear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

Oh, not that they're disloyal to the high, But loyal to the low, and cognizant Of the less scrutable majesties.

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

Tennyson conceived of the poet as the author of democracy. [Footnote: _See The Poet_.] Swinburne prolonged the Victorian paean to the liberty-loving poet [Footnote: See _Mater Triumphilis_, _Prelude_, _Epilogue_, _Litany of Nations_, and _Hertha_.] till our new group of singers appeared, whose devotion to liberty is self-evident.

It is true that to the poet liberty is an inner thing, not always synonymous with suffrage. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, all came to distrust the machinery of so-called freedom in society. Likewise Browning was not in favor of too radical social changes, and Mrs.

Browning went so far as to declare, "I love liberty so much that I hate socialism." Mob rule is as distasteful to the deeply thoughtful poet as is tyranny, for the liberty which he seeks to bring into the world is simply the condition in which every man is expressing the beauty of his truest self.

If the poet has proved that his visions are true, and that he is eager to bring society into harmony with them, what further charge remains against him? That he is "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void." He may see a vision of Utopia, and long that men shall become citizens there, but the man who actually perfects human society is he who patiently toils at the "dim, vulgar, vast, un.o.bvious work"

[Footnote: See _Sordello_.] of the world, here amending a law, here building a settlement house, and so on. Thus the reformer charges the poet. Mrs. Browning, in _Aurora Leigh_, makes much of the issue, and there the socialist, Romney Leigh, sneers at the poet's inefficiency, telling Aurora that the world

Forgets To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back Those savage hungry dogs that hunt her down To the empty grave of Christ ...

... Who has time, An hour's time--think!--to sit upon a bank And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands.

[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_. See also the letter to Robert Browning, February 17, 1845.]

The poet has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization in reform the gauge of a poet's merit. Where, in that case, would Keats be beside Hood? In our day, where would Sara Teasdale be beside Edwin Markham? Is there not danger that the poet, once launched on a career as an agitator, will no longer have time to dream dreams? If he bases his claims of worth on his ability as a "carpet-duster," [Footnote: See _Aurora Leigh_.] as Mrs. Browning calls the agitator, he is merely unsettling society,--for what end? He himself will soon have forgotten--will have become as salt that has lost its savor. Nothing is more disheartening than to see men straining every nerve to make other men righteous, who have themselves not the faintest appreciation of the beauty of holiness. Let reformers beware how they a.s.sert the poet's uselessness, our singers say, for it is an indication that they themselves are blind to the light toward which they profess to be leading men. The work of the reformer inevitably degenerates into the mere strenuosity of the campaign,