_ 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 attitude,--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 Tasso, 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, sex, 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 analysis 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 acumen 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 assume, 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
Thalassius.] 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, constitute the poetic nature. In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human passions, 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
Cassandra 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,
If angels have hereditary wings,
If not by Salic law is handed down
The poet's laurel crown,
To thee, born in the purple of the throne,
The laurel must belong.
[Footnote:
Sister Songs.]
But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in which they grow.
What have poets to say on the larger question of their social inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage.
Of course, it is not to be expected that there should be unanimity of opinion among poets as to the ideal singer's rank. In several instances, confidence in human egotism would enable the reader to make a shrewd guess as to a poet's stand on the question of caste, without the trouble of investigation. Gray, the gentleman, as a matter of course consigns his "rustic Milton" to oblivion. Lord Byron follows the fortunes of "Childe" Harold. Lord Tennyson usually deals with titled artists. [Footnote: See
Lord Burleigh, Eleanore in
A Becket, and the Count in
The Falcon.] Greater significance attaches to the gentle birth of the two prominent fictional poets of the century, Sordello and Aurora Leigh, yet in both poems the plot interest is enough to account for it. In Sordello's case, especially, Taurello's dramatic offer of political leadership to his son suffices to justify Browning's choice of his hero's rank. [Footnote: Other poems celebrating noble poets are
The Troubadour, Praed;
The King's Tragedy, Rossetti;
David, Charles di Trocca, Cale Young Rice.]
None of these instances of aristocratic birth are of much importance, and wherever there is a suggestion that the poet's birth represents a tenet of the poem's maker, one finds, naturally, praise of the singer who springs from the masses. The question of the singer's social origin was awake in verse even before Burns. So typical an eighteenth century poet as John Hughes, in lines
On a Print of Tom Burton, a Small Coal Man, moralizes on the phenomenon that genius may enter into the breast of one quite beyond the social pale. Crabbe [Footnote: See
The Patron.] and Beattie,[Footnote: See
The Minstrel.] also, seem not to be departing from the Augustan tradition in treating the fortunes of their peasant bards. But with Burns, of course, the question comes into new prominence. Yet he spreads no propaganda. His statement is merely personal:
Gie me ae spark of nature's fire!
That's a' the learning I desire.
Then, though I drudge through dub and mire
At plough or cart,
My muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart.
[Footnote:
Epistle to Lapraik.]
It is not till later verse that poets springing from the soil are given sweeping praise, because of the mysterious communion they enjoy with "nature." [Footnote: For verse glorifying the peasant aspect of Burns see Thomas Campbell,
Ode to Burns; Whittier,
Burns; Joaquim Miller,
Burns and Byron; William Bennett,
To the Memory of Burns; A. B. Street,
Robbie Burns (1867); O. W. Holmes,
The Burns Centennial; Richard Realf,
Burns; Simon Kerl,
Burns (1868); Shelley Halleck,
Burns.] Obviously the doctrine is reinforced by Wordsworth, though few of his farmer folk are geniuses, and the closest illustration of his belief that the peasant, the child of nature, is the true poet, is found in the character of the old pedlar, in the
Excursion. The origin of Keats might be assumed to have its share in molding poets' views on caste, but only the most insensitive have dared to touch upon his Cockney birth. In the realm of Best Sellers, however, the hero of May Sinclair's novel,
The Divine Fire, who is presumably modeled after Keats, is a lower class Londoner, presented with the most unflinching realism that the author can achieve. Consummate indeed is the artistry with which she enables him to keep the sympathy of his readers, even while he commits the unpardonable sin of dropping his h's. [Footnote: Another historical poet whose lowly origin is stressed in poetry is Marlowe, the son of a cobbler. See Alfred Noyes,
At the Sign of the Golden Shoe; Josephine Preston Peabody,
Marlowe.] Here and there, the poet from the ranks lifts his head in verse, throughout the last century. [Footnote: For poet-heroes of this sort see John Clare,
The Peasant Poet; Mrs. Browning,
Lady Geraldine's Courtship; Robert Buchanan,
Poet Andrew; T. E. Browne,
Tommy Big Eyes; Whittier,
Eliot; J. G. Saxe,
Murillo and his Slave.] And at present, with the penetration of the "realistic" movement into verse, one notes a slight revival of interest in the type, probably because the lower classes are popularly conceived to have more first hand acquaintance with sordidness than those hedged about by family tradition. [Footnote: See John Davidson,
A Ballad in Blank Verse; Vachel Lindsay,
The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son; John Masefield,
Dauber; Francis Carlin,
MacSweeney the Rhymer (1918).] Still, for the most part, the present attitude of poets toward the question seems to be one of indifference, since they feel that other factors are more important than caste in determining the singer's genius. Most writers of today would probably agree with the sentiment of the lines on Browning,
What if men have found
Poor footmen or rich merchants on the roll
Of his forbears? Did they beget his soul?
[Footnote: Henry van Dyke,
Sonnet.]
If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? since singers tell
us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
[Footnote:
The Centenary of Shelley.]
as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their father Spenser, who argues,
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace, and amiable sight;
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
[Footnote:
Hymn in Honour of Beauty.]
What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed Byron, and so on, almost
ad infinitum. Would not a survey of notable geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which
Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?
[Footnote:
The Sensitive Plant.]
Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his pronouncement, admitting--
Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd,
Either by chance, against the course of kind,
Or through unaptness of the substance found,
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground
That will not yield unto her form's direction,
But is preformed with some foul imperfection.
But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from Alcaeus' line,
Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho.
As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of his extant portrait:
A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of
Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright,
Low-lidded now, and luminous as love,
Anon soul-searching, ominous as night,
Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps
Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps.
[Footnote: C. L. Hildreth,
At the Mermaid (1889).]
The most unflattering portrait is no bar to poets' confidence in their brother's beauty, yet they are happiest when fashioning a frame for geniuses of whom we have no authentic description. "The love-dream of his unrecorded face," [Footnote: Rossetti,
Sonnet on Chatterton.] has led to many an idealized portrait of such a long-dead singer. Marlowe has been the favorite figure of this sort with which the fancies of our poets have played. From the glory and power of his dramas their imaginations inevitably turn to
The gloriole of his flame-coloured hair,
The lean, athletic body, deftly planned
To carry that swift soul of fire and air;
The long, thin flanks, the broad breast, and the grand
Heroic shoulders!
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,
At the Sign of the Golden Shoe.]
It is no wonder that in the last century there has grown up so firm a belief in the poet's beauty, one reflects, remembering the seraphic face of Shelley, the Greek sensuousness of Keats' profile, the romantic fire of Byron's expression. [Footnote: Browning in his youth must have encouraged the tradition. See Macready's Diary, in which he describes Browning as looking "more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw."] Yet it is a belief that must have been sorely tried since the invention of the camera has brought the verse-writer's countenance, in all its literalness, before the general public. Was it only an accident that the popularity of current poetry died just as cameras came into existence? How many a potential admirer has been lost by a glance at the frontispiece in a book of verse! In recent years, faith in soul-made beauty seems again to have shown itself justified. Likenesses of Rupert Brooke, with his "angel air," [Footnote: See W. W. Gibson,
Rupert Brooke.] of Alan Seeger, and of Joyce Kilmer in his undergraduate days, are perhaps as beautiful as any the romantic period could afford. Still the young enthusiast of the present day should be warned not to be led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing, for the spurious claimant of the laurel is learning to employ all the devices of the art photographer to obscure and transform his unaesthetic visage.
We have implied that insistence upon the artist's beauty arose with the romantic movement, but a statement to that effect would have to be made with reservations. The eighteenth century was by no means without such a conception, as the satires of that period testify, being full of allusions to poetasters' physical defects, with the obvious implication that they are indicative of spiritual deformity, and of literary sterility. Then, from within the romantic movement itself, a critic might exhume verse indicating that faith in the beautiful singer was by no means universal;--that, on the other hand, the interestingly ugly bard enjoyed considerable vogue. He would find, for example, Moore's
Lines on a Squinting Poetess, and Praed's
The Talented Man. In the latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,
He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.
Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So, likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote:
Spoon River Anthology.]
for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!" of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.
Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and assures us,
Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote:
Out from Behind This Mask.]
but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing features?
Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture of Keats,
The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
[Footnote:
A Vision of Poets.]
It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,
A lovely youth,
With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.
[Footnote:
A Life Drama.]
And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod,
A Vision of Poesy (1898); Frances Fuller,
To Edith May (1851); Metta Fuller,
Lines to a Poetess (1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it.
"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth,
On the Death of James Hogg; Browning,
Sordello,
By the Fireside; Mrs. Browning,
Aurora Leigh; Principal Shairp,
Balliol Scholars; Alfred Noyes,
Tales of the Mermeid Inn.] poets invariably possess, but the less phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas,
The Life of Charles Lamb, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines
To a Poet Breaking Silence, he asserts,
Yes, in this silent interspace
God sets his poems in thy face,
and again, in
Her Portrait, he muses,
How should I gage what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
As birds see not the casement for the sky.
It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical nature,--through his
Dream dazzled gaze
Aflame and burning like a god in song.
[Footnote: W. W. Gibson,
To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke.]
Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." [Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin,
John Keats, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth,
On the Death of James Hogg] Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,
With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,
Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fictitious poet that
His steadfast eye burnt inwardly
As burning out his soul,
[Footnote: '
The Poet's Vow.]
we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done.
The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See
A Poet's Epitaph, and
Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes.] Mrs. Browning notes his
Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.
[Footnote:
On a Portrait of Wordsworth.]
Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. I. Osborne,
Arthur Hugh Clough.]
But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to
See, no longer blinded with his eyes,
[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke,
Not With Vain Tears.]
and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness in
Samson Agonistes have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton,
The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze
He saw, but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night,
[Footnote:
Progress of Poesy.]
and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John Hughes,
To the Memory of Milton; William Lisle Bowles,
Milton in Age; Bulwer Lytton,
Milton; W. H. Burleigh,
The Lesson; R. C. Robbins,
Milton.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston, also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may
By the darkness of thine eyes discern
How piercing was the light within thy soul.
[Footnote: See Rossetti,
P. B. Marston; Swinburne,
Transfiguration, Marston, Light; Watts-Dunton,
A Grave by the Sea.]
Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an assertion as that of Keats,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
[Footnote: See Keats,
Sonnet on Homer, Landor,
Homer, Laertes, Agatha; Joyce Kilmer,
The Proud Poet, Vision.]
Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse, one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth,
Thou that, when first my quickened ear
Thy deeper harmonies might hear,
I imaged to myself as old and blind,
For so were Milton and Maeonides,
[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord,
Wordsworth (1845).]
and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See
The Blind Poet, and
Lost. See also Francis Carlin
Blind O'Cahan (1918.)]
But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it, for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as opposed to the picture of the singer blind to his surroundings, we have the opposite picture--that of a singer with every sense visibly alert. At the very beginning of a narrative and descriptive poem, the reader can generally distinguish between the idealistic and the sensuous singer. The more spiritually minded poet is usually characterized as blond. The natural tendency to couple a pure complexion and immaculate thoughts is surely aided, here, by portraits of Shelley, and of Milton in his youth. The brunette poet, on the other hand, is perforce a member of the fleshly school. The two types are clearly differentiated in Bulwer Lytton's
Dispute of the Poets. The spiritual one
Lifted the azure light of earnest eyes,
but his brother,
The one with brighter hues and darker curls
Clustering and purple as the fruit of the vine,
Seemed like that Summer-Idol of rich life
Whom sensuous Greece, inebriate with delight
From orient myth and symbol-worship wrought.
The decadents favor swarthy poets, and, in describing their features, seize upon the most expressive symbols of sensuality. Thus the hero of John Davidson's
Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet is
A youth whose sultry eyes
Bold brow and wanton mouth were not all lust.
But even the idealistic poet, if he be not one-sided, must have sensuous features, as Browning conceives him. We are told of Sordello,
Yourselves shall trace
(The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine,
A sharp and restless lip, so well combine
With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive
Delight at every sense; you can believe
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from her mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure...
* * * * *
You recognize at once the finer dress
Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness
At eye and ear.
Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in the
Canterbury Tales, is described by the burly host,
He in the waast is shape as wel as I;
This were a popet in an arm tenbrace
For any woman, smal and fair of face?
[Footnote:
Prologue to Sir Thopas.]
Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the handsome young squire, who
Coude songes make, and wel endyte.
[Footnote:
Prologue.]
Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play,
The Canterbury Pilgrims, derives the heartiest enjoyment from Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, interpolated by his friends into the
Castle of Indolence, to remain, though it begins with the line,
A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems.
And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe."
[Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.]
Possibly it would not be unreasonable to take difference in weight as another distinction between idealistic and sensuous poets. Of one recent realistic poet it is recorded, "How a poet could
not be a glorious eater, he said he could not see, for the poet was happier than other men, by reason of his acuter senses." [Footnote: Richard Le Gallienne,
Joyce Kilmer.] As a rule, however, decadent and spiritual poets alike shrink from the thought of grossness, in spite of the fact that Joyce Kilmer was able to win his wager, "I will write a poem about a delicatessen shop. It will be a high-brow poem. It will be liked." [Footnote: Robert Cortez Holliday,
Memoir of Joyce Kilmer, p. 62.] Of course Keats accustomed the public to the idea that there are aesthetic distinctions in the sense of taste, but throughout the last century the idea of a poet enjoying solid food was an anomaly. Whitman's proclamation of himself, "Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating and drinking and breeding" [Footnote:
Song of Myself.] automatically shut him off, in the minds of his contemporaries, from consideration as a poet.
It is a nice question just how far a poet may go in ignoring the demands of the flesh. Shelley's friends record that his indifference reached the stage of forgetting, for days at a time, that he was in a body at all. Even more extreme was the attitude of Poe, as it is presented at length in Olive Dargan's drama,
The Poet. So cordial is his detestation of food and bed that he not only eschews them himself, but withholds them from his wife, driving the poor woman to a lingering death from tuberculosis, while he himself succumbs to delirium tremens. In fact, excessive abstemiousness, fostering digestive disorders, has been alleged to be the secret of the copious melancholy verse in the last century. It is not the ill-nourished poet, however, but enemies of the melancholy type of verse, who offer this explanation. Thus Walt Whitman does not hesitate to write poetry on the effect of his digestive disorders upon his gift, [Footnote: See
As I Sit Writing Here.] and George Meredith lays the weakness of
Manfred to the fact that it was
Projected from the bilious Childe.
[Footnote: George Meredith,
Manfred.]
But to all conscious of possessing poetical temperament in company with emaciation, the explanation has seemed intolerably sordid.
To be sure, the unhealthy poet is not ubiquitous. Wordsworth's
Prelude describes a life of exuberant physical energy. Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. J. G. Holland's poet was the superior of his comrades when brawn as well as brain, contended. [Footnote:
Kathrina.] William Henry Burleigh, also, described his favorite poet as
A man who measured six feet four:
Broad were his shoulders, ample was his chest,
Compact his frame, his muscles of the best.
[Footnote:
A Portrait.]
With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers,
A heavy handed blow, I think,
Would make your veins drip scented ink.
[Footnote:
To Certain Poets.]
But the poet hero of the Harold Bell Wright type is receiving his share of ridicule, as well as praise, at present. A farce,
Fame and the Poet, by Lord Dunsany, advertises the adulation by feminine readers resulting from a poet's pose as a "man's man." And Ezra Pound, who began his career as an exemplar of virility,[Footnote: See
The Revolt against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry.] finds himself unable to keep up the pose, and so resorts to the complaint,
We are compared to that sort of person,
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it.
[Footnote:
The Condolence.]
The most sensible argument offered by the advocate of better health in poets is made by the chronic invalid, Mrs. Browning. She causes Aurora Leigh's cousin Romney to argue,
Reflect; if art be in truth the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon
In order to reach up unto that higher;
And none can stand a tip-toe in that place
He cannot stand in with two stable feet.
[Footnote:
Aurora Leigh. See also the letter to Robert Browning, May 6, 1845.]
Mrs. Browning's theory is not out of key with a professedly scientific account of genius, not unpopular nowadays, which represents art as the result of excess vitality. [Footnote: See R. C. Robbins,
Michael Angelo (1904).]
Yet, on the whole, the frail poet still holds his own; how securely is illustrated by the familiarity of the idea as applied to other artists, outside the domain of poetry. It is noteworthy that in a recent book of essays by the painter, Birge Harrison, one runs across the contention:
In fact, as a noted painter once said to me: These
semi-invalids neither need nor deserve our commiseration,
for in reality the beggars have the advantage
of us.
Their nerves are always sensitive and keyed
to pitch, while we husky chaps have to flog ours up to
the point. We must dig painfully through the outer
layers of flesh before we can get at the spirit, while the
invalids are all spirit.
[Footnote: From
Landscape Painters, p. 184.]
That such a belief had no lack of support from facts in the last century, is apparent merely from naming over the chief poets. Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Rossetti, all publish their ill-health through their verse. Even Browning, in whose verse, if anywhere, one would expect to find the virile poet, shows Sordello turned to poetry by the fact of his physical weakness.[Footnote: So nearly ubiquitous has ill-health been among modern poets, that Max Nordau, in his widely read indictment of art,
Degeneration, was able to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.]
Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of whom we learn,
Too long had sickness left her pining trace
With slow still touch on each decaying grace;
Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien;
Despair upon his languid smile was seen.
[Footnote:
Monody on Henry Headley.]
We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J. Hogg,
Life of Shelley, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out of his verse. So early as the composition of the
Revolt of Islam, Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction,
Death and love are yet contending for their prey,
and in
Adonais he appears as
A power
Girt round with weakness.
* * * * *
A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbearing heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.
Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as consumption saps his strength:
You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
[Footnote:
Rosalind and Helen.]
The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White,
Sonnet to Consumption.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the last time in Tennyson's
The Brook, where the young poet hastens to Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence.
Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero:
More tremulous
Than the soft star that in the azure East
Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day
Was his frail soul.
[Footnote:
A Life Drama.]
Arnold, likewise, in
Thyrsis, follows the poetic tradition in thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death:
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground.
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.
In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse:
The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn,
The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,
The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,
The almond face that Giotto drew so well,
The weary face of Dante.
[Footnote:
Ravenna.]
Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the
Inferno so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another,
Behold him, how Hell's reek
Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek.
[Footnote:
Dante at Verona.]
A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore:
And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.
[Footnote:
A Captain of Song.]
In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is
A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote:
Prince Athanase, a fragment.]
In
Alastor, too, we see the hero wasting away until
His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.
The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile.
Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to the mutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast by Fate into the body of a woman?
As the battle of feminism dragged its bloody way through all fields of endeavor in the last century, it of course has left its traces in the realm of poetry. But here the casualties appear to be light,--in fact, it is a disappointment to the suffragist to find most of the blows struck by the female aspirant for glory, with but few efforts to parry them on the part of the male contingent. Furthermore, in verse concerned with specific woman poets, men have not failed to give them their due, or more. From Miriam [Footnote: See Barry Cornwall,
Miriam.] and Sappho, [Footnote: Southey,
Sappho; Freneau,
Monument of Phaon; Kingsley,
Sappho, Swinburne,
On the Cliffs,
Sapphics,
Anactoria; Cale Young Rice,
Sappho's Death Song; J. G. Percival, Sappho; Percy Mackaye,
Sappho and Phaon; W. A. Percy,
Sappho in Lenkos.] to the long list of nineteenth century female poets--Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: Browning,
One Word More,
Preface to The Ring and the Book; James Thomson, B. V.,
E. B. B.; Sidney Dobell,
On the Death of Mrs. Browning.] Christina Rossetti, [Footnote: Swinburne,
Ballad of Appeal to Christina Rossetti,
New Year's Eve,
Dedication to Christina Rossetti.] Emily Bronte, [Footnote: Stephen Phillips,
Emily Bronte.] Alice Meynell, [Footnote: Francis Thompson,
Sister Songs,
On her Photograph,
To a Poet Breaking Silence.] Felicia Hemans, [Footnote: L. E. Maclean,
Felicia Hemans.] Adelaide Proctor, [Footnote: Edwin Arnold,
Adelaide Anne Proctor.] Helen Hunt, [Footnote: Richard Watson Gilder,
H.
H.] Emma Lazarus [Footnote:
Ibid.,
To E. Lazarus.]--one finds woman the subject of complimentary verse from their brothers. There is nothing to complain of here, we should say at first, and yet, in the unreserved praise given to their greatest is a note that irritates the feminists. For men have made it plain that Sappho was not like other women; it is the "virility" of her style that appeals to them; they have even gone so far as to hail her "manlike maiden." [Footnote: Swinburne,
On the Cliffs.] So the feminists have been only embittered by their brothers' praise.
As time wears on, writers averse to feminine verse seem to be losing thecourage of their convictions. At the end of the eighteenth century, woman's opponent was not afraid to express himself. Woman writers were sometimes praised, but it was for one quality alone, the chastity of their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See
To the Author of "A Fatal Friendship."] and Tom Moore [Footnote: See
To Mrs. Henry Tighe.] both deplored the need of such an element in masculine verse. But Moore could not resist counteracting the effect of his chary praise by a play,
The Blue Stocking, which burlesques the literary pose in women. He seemed to feel, also, that he had neatly quelled their poetical aspirations when he advertised his aversion to marrying a literary woman. [Footnote: See
The Catalogue. Another of his poems ridiculing poetesses is
The Squinting Poetess.] Despite a chivalrous sentimentality, Barry Cornwall took his stand with Moore on the point, exhorting women to choose love rather than a literary career. [Footnote: See
To a Poetess. More seriously, Landor offered the same discouragement to his young friend with poetical tastes. [Footnote: See
To Write as Your Sweet Mother Does.] On the whole the prevalent view expressed early in the nineteenth century is the considerate one that while women lack a literary gift, they have, none the less, sweet poetical natures. Bulwer Lytton phrased the old-fashioned distinction between his hero and heroine,
In each lay poesy--for woman's heart
Nurses the stream, unsought and oft unseen;
And if it flow not through the tide of art,
Nor win the glittering daylight--you may ween
It slumbers, but not ceases, and if checked
The egress of rich words, it flows in thought,
And in its silent mirror doth reflect
Whate'er affection to its banks hath brought.
[Footnote: Milton.]
Yet the poetess has two of the strongest poets of the romantic period on her side. Wordsworth, in his many allusions to his sister Dorothy, appeared to feel her possibilities equal to his own, and in verses on an anthology, he offered praise of a more general nature to verse written by women. [Footnote: See To Lady Mary Lowther.] And beside the sober judgment of Wordsworth, one may place the unbounded enthusiasm of Shelley, who not only praises extravagantly the verse of an individual, Emilia Viviani, [Footnote: See the introduction to Epipsychidion.] but who also offers us an imaginary poetess of supreme powers,--Cythna, in
The Revolt of Islam.
It is disappointing to the agitator to find the question dropping out of sight in later verse. In the Victorian period it comes most plainly to the surface in Browning, and while the exquisite praise of his
Lyric love, half angel and half bird,
reveals him a believer in at least sporadic female genius, his position on the question of championing the entire sex is at least equivocal. In
The Two Poets of Croisic he deals with the eighteenth century in France, where the literary woman came so gloriously into her own. Browning represents a man writing under a feminine pseudonym and winning the admiration of the celebrities of the day--only to have his verse tossed aside as worthless as soon as his sex is revealed. Woman wins by her charm, seems to be the moral. A hopeful sign, however, is the fact that of late years one poet produced his best work under a feminine
nom de plume, and found it no handicap in obtaining recognition. [Footnote: William Sharp, "Fiona McLeod."] If indifference is the attitude of the male poet, not so of the woman writer. She insists that her work shall redound, not to her own glory, merely, but to that of her entire sex as well. For the most worthy presentation of her case, we must turn to Mrs. Browning, though the radical feminist is not likely to approve of her attitude. "My secret profession of faith," she admitted to Robert Browning, "is--that there is a natural inferiority of mind in women--of the intellect--not by any means of the moral nature--and that the history of Art and of genius testifies to this fact openly." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, July 4, 1845.] Still, despite this private surrender to the enemy, Mrs. Browning defends her sex well.
In a short narrative poem,
Mother and Poet, Mrs. Browning claims for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be found in
Aurora Leigh. She feels that making her imaginary poet a woman is a departure from tradition, and she strives to justify it. Much of the debasing adulation and petty criticism heaped upon Aurora must have been taken from Mrs. Browning's own experience. Ignoring insignificant antagonism to her, Aurora is seriously concerned with the charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex. Romney declares,
Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations. She confesses,
We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.
But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom, because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus,
Echoes; Olive Dargan,
Ye Who are to Sing.]
Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit?
In answer, one is haunted by the line,
I too was born in Arcadia.
Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote: See
Corydon.] Collins, [Footnote: See
Selim, or the Shepherd's Moral.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See
Pastoral on the Death of Daemon.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes. [Footnote: See
Huggins and Duggins, and
The Forlorn Shepherd's Complaint.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes'
Letter to a Friend in the Country, and Sidney Dyer's
A Country Walk, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday.
With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the poet to nature becomes, of course, more intimate. But Cowper and Thomson keep themselves out of their nature poetry to such an extent that it is hard to tell what their ideal position would be, and not till the publication of Beattie's
The Minstrel do we find a poem in which the poet is nurtured under the influence of a natural scenery. At the very climax of the romantic period the poet is not always bred in the country. We find Byron revealing himself as one who seeks nature only occasionally, as a mistress in whose novelty resides a good deal of her charm. Shelley, too, portrays a poet reared in civilization, but escaping to nature. [Footnote: See
Epipsychidion, and
Alastor.] Still, it is obvious that ever since the time of Burns and Wordsworth, the idea of a poet nurtured from infancy in nature's bosom has been extremely popular.
There are degrees of naturalness in nature, however. How far from the hubbub of commercialism should the poet reside? Burns and Wordsworth were content with the farm country, but for poets whose theories were not so intimately joined with experience such an environment was too tame. Bowles would send his visionary boy into the wilderness. [Footnote: See
The Visionary Boy.] Coleridge and Southey went so far as to lay plans for emigrating, in person, to the banks of the Susquehanna. Shelley felt that savage conditions best foster poetry. [Footnote: See the
Defense of Poetry: "In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet."] Campbell, in
Gertrude of Wyoming, made his bard an Indian, and commented on his songs,
So finished he the rhyme, howe'er uncouth,
That true to Nature's fervid feelings ran
(And song is but the eloquence of truth).
The early American poet, J. G. Percival, expressed the same theory, declaring of poetry,
Its seat is deeper in the savage breast
Than in the man of cities.
[Footnote:
Poetry.]
To most of us, this conception of the poet is familiar because of acquaintance, from childhood, with Chibiabus, "he the sweetest of all singers," in Longfellow's
Hiawatha.
But the poet of to-day may well pause, before he starts to an Indian reservation. What is the mysterious benefit which the poet derives from nature? Humility and common sense, Burns would probably answer, and that response would not appeal to the majority of poets. A mystical experience of religion, Wordsworth would say, of course. A wealth of imagery, nineteenth century poets would hardly think it worth while to add, for the influence of natural scenery upon poetic metaphors has come to be such a matter of course that one hardly realizes its significance. Perhaps, too, poets should admit oftener than they do the influence of nature's rhythms upon their style. As Madison Cawein says
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a meter none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore.
[Footnote:
Preludes.]
The influence of nature which the romantic poet stressed most, however, was a negative one. In a sense in which Wordsworth probably did not intend it, the romantic poet betrayed himself hastening to nature
More like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved.
What nature is not, seemed often her chief charm to the romanticist. Bowles sent his visionary boy to "romantic solitude." Byron [Footnote: See
Childe Harold.] and Shelley, [Footnote: See
Epipsychidion.] too, were as much concerned with escaping from humanity as with meeting nature. Only Wordsworth, in the romantic period, felt that the poet's life ought not to be wholly disjoined from his fellows.
[Footnote: See
Tintern Abbey,
Ode on Intimations of Immortality, and
The Prelude.]
Of course the poet's quarrel with his unappreciative public has led him to express a longing for complete solitude sporadically, even down to the present time, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "romantic solitude" as the poet's perennial habitat seems just about to have run its course. Of the major poets, Matthew Arnold alone consistently urges the poet to flee from "the strange disease of modern life." The Scholar Gypsy lives the ideal life of a poet, Matthew Arnold would say, and preserves his poetical temperament because of his escape from civilization:
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled brings.
No doubt, solitude magnifies the poet's sense of his own personality. Stephen Phillips says of Emily Bronte's poetic gift,
Only barren hills
Could wring the woman riches out of thee,
[Footnote:
Emily Bronte.]
and there are several poets of whom a similar statement might be made. But the Victorians were aware that only half of a poet's nature was developed thus. Tennyson [Footnote: See
The Palace of Art.] and Mrs. Browning [Footnote: See
The Poet's Vow; Letters to Robert Browning, January 1, 1846, and March 20, 1845.] both sounded a warning as to the dangers of complete isolation. And at present, though the eremite poet is still with us, [Footnote: See Lascelles Ambercrombe,
An Escape; J. E. Flecker,
Dirge; Madison Cawein,
Comrading; Yeats,
The Lake Isle of Innisfree.] he does not have everything his own way.
For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared in London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter of course,
The coy muse, with me she would not live
In this dark city,
[Footnote:
Epistle to George Felton Mathew. Wordsworth's sonnet, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at this time.]
and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet,
In cities he was low and mean;
The mountain waters washed him clean.
[Footnote:
The Poet.]
But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse,
She can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore.
[Footnote:
L'Envoi.]
A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary,
The Rossettis, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See
The City of Dreadful Night.] this is not the same thing as the romantic poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment.
Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: See
On London Stones.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious about his city poets. [Footnote: See
Fleet Street Eclogues.] But as landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. [Footnote: See
Paris.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl Sandburg,
Chicago Poems; Edgar Lee Masters,
The Loop; William Griffith,
City Pastorals; Charles H. Towne,
The City.] are beginning to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called
A Winter Night reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the most bucolic shepherd among his flocks.
To poets' minds the only unaesthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry inspired by it, the reader of the
Spoon River Anthology is still disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment.
So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, but usually, as in the Old English poem,
The Wanderer, he has been unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See
The Lay of the Last Minstrel.] But Byron set the fashion among poets of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote:
Epistle to Augusta.] and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's autobiographical novels,
Rest Harrow and
Open Country, and William H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. [Footnote: See also Francis Carlin,
Denby the Rhymer (1918); Henry Herbert Knibbs,
Songs of the Trail (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, concurred in the view, declaring,
Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart.
[Footnote:
Sonnet to Sidney.]
"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's
Complaint to His Empty Purse, onward, English poetry has borne the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camoeens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse.
The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's
Bohemia reveals the fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, the cost
per caput will be
nil. Not only so, but the poet is likely to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement,
Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay!
One would I sell and daffodils buy
To feed my soul.
[Footnote:
Beauty, Theodore Harding Rand.]
What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually asking.
What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines
Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson: Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased
And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.
Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public,
You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me
After you've starved me and driven me dead.
Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread.
[Footnote:
The Young Poet.]
Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's
Ina, the author himself appears, raving,
A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool!
Would you know what it means to be a poet?
It is to want a friend, to want a home,
A country, money,--aye, to want a meal.
[Footnote: See also John Savage,
He Writes for Bread.]
But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. Browning boasts,
The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented
Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes,
But culls his Faustus from philosophers
And not from poets.
[Footnote:
Aurora Leigh.]
A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See
Advice to Mr. Pope, John Hughes;
Economy, The Poet and the Dun, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See
To a Poet Abandoning His Art, Barry Cornwall; and
Poets and Poets, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans,
Religio Poetae.] In fact, even in these days, we are comparatively safe from a poet's strike.
Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in
A Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For, he represents their terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy,
Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes
Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers;
What is a world of vanities
To a world as fair as ours?
In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in
An Epistle to Davie, Fellow Poet:
To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When bones are crazed, and blind is thin
Is doubtless great distress,
Yet then content would make us blest.
Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in
Epipsychidion,
Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.
Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as
Tales of the Mermaid Inn, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston Peabody,
The Golden Shoes; Richard Le Gallienne,
Faery Gold; J. G. Saxe,
The Poet to his Garret; W. W. Gibson,
The Empty Purse; C. G. Halpine,
To a Wealthy Amateur Critic; Simon Kerl,
Ode to Debt, A Leaf of Autobiography; Thomas Gordon Hake,
The Poet's Feast; Dana Burnet,
In a Garret; Henry Aylett Sampson,
Stephen Phillips Bankrupt.] The poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take away his delight in song. In Markham's
The Shoes of Happiness, only the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries,
Starving, still I smile,
Laugh at want and wrong,
He is fed and clothed
To whom God giveth song.
[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich,
A Crowned Poet.]
It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect,
One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye,
The cave of Poverty and Poetry.
Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess,
Emblem of music caused by emptiness,
[Footnote:
Dunciad.]
is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates on the poet,
The Muse gave special charge
His learning should be deep and large,--
* * * * *
His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
Every maxim of dreadful need.
* * * * *
By want and pain God screeneth him
Till his appointed hour.
[Footnote:
The Poet.]
It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is appalling. What can account for it?
In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him,
For I had the share of life that might have filled a century,
Before its fourth in time had passed me by.
[Footnote:
Epistle to Augusta.]
A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects,
... For my thirty years,
Dashed with sun and splashed with tears,
Wan with revel, red with wine,
Other wiser happier men
Take the full three score and ten.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes,
Tales of the Mermaid Inn.]
this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily Bronte, of whom it is written:
They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips.
Emily Bronte.]
Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death
Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
[Footnote:
Adonais.]
With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his article on Joyce Kilmer in
The Bookman, Richard LeGallienne speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild-winged."
It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.
More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In Alexander Smith's
Life Drama, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic muses,
He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.
In
Sordello, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's
Keats:
I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,
or in Francis Thompson's
The Cloud's Swan Song:
I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.
Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge,
Youth and Age; J. G. Percival,
Poetry; William Cullen Bryant,
I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion; Bayard Taylor,
The Return of the Goddess; Richard Watson Gilder,
To a Young Poet,
The Poet's Secret; George Henry Boker,
To Bayard Taylor; Martin Farquhar Tupper,
To a Young Poet; William E. Henley,
Something Is Dead; Francis Thompson,
From the Night of Foreboding; Thomas Hardy,
In the Seventies; Lewis Morris,
On a Young Poet; Richard Le Gallienne,
A Face in a Book; Richard Middleton,
The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet; Don Marquis,
The Singer (1915); John Hall Wheelock,
The Man to his Dead Poet (1919); Cecil Roberts,
The Youth of Beauty (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr.,
The Lost Singer (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay,
To a Poet that Died Young.]
Optima dies ...
prima fugit; the note echoes and reechoes through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's
Progress of Poetry:
Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones;
The mount is mute, the channel dry,
And down he lays his weary bones.
But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them to do so [Footnote: See Scott,
Farewell to the Muse; Landor,
Dull is my Verse; J. G. Percival,
Invocation; Matthew Arnold,
Growing Old; Longfellow,
My Books; O. W. Holmes,
The Silent Melody; C. W. Stoddard,
The Minstrel's Harp; P. H. Hayne,
The Broken Chords; J. C. MacNiel,
A Prayer; Harvey Hubbard,
The Old Minstrel.]--but it would never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne,
Age and Song, The Centenary of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo; O. W. Holmes,
Whittier's Eightieth Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday; E. E. Stedman,
Ad Vatem; P. H. Hayne,
To Longfellow; Richard Gilder,
Jocoseria; M. F. Tupper,
To the Poet of Memory; Edmund Gosse,
To Lord Tennyson on his Eightieth Birthday; Alfred Noyes,
Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of Swinburne; Alfred Austin,
The Poet's Eightieth Birthday; Lucy Larcom,
J. G. Whittier; Mary Clemmer,
To Whittier; Percy Mackaye,
Browning to Ben Ezra.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may have had a genuine influence on younger writers.
Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is equivocal, as Landor's
Dull is my verse: not even thou
Who movest many cares away
From this lone breast and weary brow
Canst make, as once, its fountains play;
No, nor those gentle words that now
Support my heart to hear thee say,
The bird upon the lonely bough
Sings sweetest at the close of day.
It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in
Cleon and the
Prologue to Aslando, should doubtless be remembered for his belief in
The last of life for which the first was made,
as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines
To Get the Final Lilt of Songs indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See
My Prologue.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See
The Mage.] were not dismayed by their longevity.
But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard as old, [Footnote:
The Bard.] and that Scott's minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. [Footnote: See
Lochiel's Warning.] It is the prophetic power of these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. The poet in Campbell's poem explains,
'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.
Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares,
I count it strange and hard to understand
That nearly all young poets should write old.
... It may be perhaps
Such have not settled long and deep enough
In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still
The memory mixes with the vision, spoils
And works it turbid. Or perhaps again
In order to discover the Muse Sphinx
The melancholy desert must sweep around
Behind you as before.
Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She sighs, remembering her own youth,
Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment:
... Many men are poets in their youth,
But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all age the indomitable song.
[Footnote:
Genius in Beauty.]
Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See
To any Poet.] too, and Richard Watson Gilder [Footnote: See
Life is a Bell.] feel that increasing power of song comes with age.
It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at thirty, asserting,
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
and conversely it seems fitting that a
De Senectute should come from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See
There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way.] and Rupert Brooke, [Footnote: See
The Funeral of Youth: Threnody.]--the complaint of Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his inspiration, [Footnote: See
Growing Old, Youth.]--that, to their future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later poem,
Old Poets.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection,
White-bearded and with eyes that look afar
From their still region of perpetual snow,
Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men.
[Footnote: James Russell Lowell,
Thorwald's Lay.] _