The Poet's Poet Part 26

The puritan sees, with grim pleasure, that an occasional poet confesses that his sense of beauty is not strong enough to lead him at all times.

Emerson admits this, telling us, in _The Poet_, that although the singer perceives ideals in his moments of afflatus which

Turn his heart from lovely maids, And make the darlings of the earth Swainish, coa.r.s.e, and nothing worth,

these moments of exaltation pa.s.s, and the singer finds himself a mere man, with an unusually rich sensuous nature,

Eager for good, not hating ill; On his tense chords all strokes are felt, The good, the bad, with equal zeal.

It is not unheard-of to find a poet who, despite occasional expressions of confidence in the power of beauty to sustain him, loses his courage at other times, and lays down a system of rules for his guidance that is quite as strict as any which puritans could formulate. Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty_ does not altogether embody the aesthetic conception of effortless right living. One may, perhaps, explain this poem on the grounds that Wordsworth is laying down principles of conduct, not for poets, but for the world at large, which is blind to aesthetic principles. Not thus, however, may one account for the self-tortures of Arthur Clough, or of Christina Rossetti, who was fully aware of the disagreeableness of the standards which she set up for herself. She reflected grimly,

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end!

Will the day's journey take the whole long day?

From morn till night, my friend.

[Footnote: _Uphill._]

It cannot be accidental, however, that wherever a poet voices a stern conception of virtue, he is a poet whose sensibility to physical beauty is not noteworthy. This is obviously true in the case of both Clough and Christina Rossetti. At intervals it was true of Wordsworth, whereas in the periods of his inspiration he expressed his belief that goodness is as a matter of good taste. The pleasures of the imagination were then so intense that they destroyed in him all desire for dubious delights.

Thus in the _Prelude_ he described an unconscious purification of his life by his wors.h.i.+p of physical beauty, saying of nature,

If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With G.o.d and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires, The gift is yours.

Dante Gabriel, not Christina, possessed the most purely poetical nature in the Rossetti family, and his moral conceptions were the typical aesthetic ones, as incomprehensible to the puritan as they were to Ruskin, who exclaimed, "I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but you do just whatever you like as far as possible--as puppies and tomt.i.ts do." [Footnote: See E. L. Cary, The Rossettis, p.79.] To poets themselves however, there appears nothing incomprehensible about the inevitable rightness of their conduct, for they have not pa.s.sed out of the happy stage of Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty,_

When love is an unerring light, And joy its own felicity.

For the most part, whenever the puritan imagines that the poet has capitulated, he is mistaken, and the apparent self-denial in the poet's life is really an exquisite sort of epicureanism. The likelihood of such misunderstanding by the world is indicated by Browning in _Sordello,_ wherein the hero refuses to taste the ordinary pleasures of life, because he wishes to enjoy the flavor of the highest pleasure untainted.

He resolves,

The world shall bow to me conceiving all Man's life, who see its blisses, great and small Afar--not tasting any; no machine To exercise my utmost will is mine, Be mine mere consciousness: Let men perceive What I could do, a mastery believe a.s.serted and established to the throng By their selected evidence of song, Which now shall prove, whate'er they are, or seek To be, I am.

The claims of the puritans being set aside, the poet must, finally, meet the objection of his third disputant, the philosopher, the one accuser whose charges the poet is wont to treat with respect. What validity, the philosopher asks, can be claimed for apprehension of truth, of the good-beautiful, secured not through the intellect, but through emotion?

What proof has the poet that feeling is as unerring in detecting the essential nature of the highest good as is the reason?

There is great variance in the breach between philosophers and poets on this point. Between the philosopher of purely rationalistic temper, and the poet who

dares to take Life's rule from pa.s.sion craved for pa.s.sion's sake, [Footnote: Said of Byron. Wordsworth, _Not in the Lucid Intervals._]

there is absolutely no common ground, of course. Such a poet finds the rigid ethical system of a rationalistic philosophy as uncharacteristic of the actual fluidity of the world as ever Cratylus did. Feeling, but not reason, may be swift enough in its transformations to mirror the world, such a poet believes, and he imitates the actual flux of things, not with a wagging of the thumb, like Cratylus, but with a flutter of the heart. Thus one finds Byron characteristically a.s.serting, "I hold virtue, in general, or the virtues generally, to be only in the disposition, each a _feeling,_ not a principle." [Footnote: _Letter to Charles Dallas,_ January 21, 1808.]

On the other hand, one occasionally meets a point of view as opposite as that of Poe, who believed that the poet, no less than the philosopher, is governed by reason solely,--that the poetic imagination is a purely intellectual function. [Footnote: See the _Southern Literary Messenger,_ II, 328, April, 1836.]

The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets,--Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their natures.

The most profound utterances of poets on this subject, however, show them to be, not rationalists, but thoroughgoing Platonists. The feeling in which they trust is a Platonic intuition which includes the reason, but exists above it. At least this is the view of Sh.e.l.ley, and Sh.e.l.ley has, more largely than any other man, moulded the beliefs of later English poets. It is because he judges imaginative feeling to be always in harmony with the deepest truths perceived by the reason that he advertises his intention to purify men by awakening their feelings.

Therefore, in his preface to _The Revolt of Islam_ he says "I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue." in the preface to the _Cenci,_ again, he declares, "Imagination is as the immortal G.o.d which should take flesh for the redemption of human pa.s.sion."

The poet, while thus expressing absolute faith in the power of beauty to redeem the world, yet is obliged to take into account the Platonic distinction between the beautiful and the lover of the beautiful.

[Footnote: _Symposium,_ -- 204.]

No man is pure poet, he admits, but in proportion as he approaches perfect artistry, his life is purified. Sh.e.l.ley is expressing the beliefs of practically all artists when he says, "The greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men; and the exceptions, as they regard those who possess the poetical faculty in a high, yet an inferior degree, will be found upon consideration to confirm, rather than to destroy, the rule."

[Footnote: _The Defense of Poetry._]

Sidney Lanier's verse expresses this argument of Sh.e.l.ley precisely. In _The Crystal,_ Lanier indicates that the ideal poet has never been embodied. Pointing out the faults of his favorite poets, he contrasts their muddy characters with the perfect purity of Christ. And in _Life and Song_ he repeats the same idea:

None of the singers ever yet Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, Or truly sung his true, true thought.

Philosophers may retort that this imperfection in the singer's life arises not merely from the inevitable difference between the lover and the beauty which he loves, but from the fact that the object of the poet's love is not really that highest beauty which is identical with the good. Poets are content with the "many beautiful," Plato charges, instead of pressing on to discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote: Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal.

Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_ "A. E." exclaims,

I leave For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower, For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive; For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower.

But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him, and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to him "a dome of many colored gla.s.s" that reveals, yet stains, "the white radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her ravis.h.i.+ng.

This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly pa.s.sions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may, according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of Sh.e.l.leyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the preeminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature of the artist is manifest.

CHAPTER VI

THE POET'S RELIGION

There was a time, if we may trust anthropologists, when the poet and the priest were identical, but the modern zeal for specialization has not tolerated this doubling of function. So utterly has the poet been robbed of his priestly character that he is notorious, nowadays, as possessing no religion at all. At least, representatives of the three strongest critical forces in society, philosophers, puritans and plain men, a.s.sert with equal vehemence that the poet has no religion that agrees with their interpretation of that word.

As was the case in their attack upon the poet's morals, so in the refusal to recognize his religious beliefs, the poet's three enemies are in merely accidental agreement. The philosopher condemns the poet as incapable of forming rational theological tenets, because his temper is unspeculative, or at most, carries him no farther than a materialistic philosophy. The puritan condemns the poet as lacking reverence, that is, as having no "religious instinct." The plain man, of course, charges the poet, in this particular as in all others, with failure to conform. The poet shows no respect, he avers, for the orthodox beliefs of society.

The quarrel of the poet and the philosopher has at no time been more in evidence than at present. The unspeculativeness of contemporary poetry is almost a creed. Poets, if they are to be read, must take a solemn pledge to confine their range of subject-matter to fleeting impressions of the world of sense. The quarrel was only less in evidence in the period just before the present one, at the time when the cry, "art for art's sake," held the attention of the public. At that time philosophers could point out that Walter Pater, the molder of poet's opinions, had said, "It is possible that metaphysics may be one of the things which we must renounce, if we would mould our lives to artistic perfection." This narrowness of interest, this deliberate shutting of one's self up within the confines of the physically appealing, has been believed to be characteristic of all poets. The completeness of their satisfaction in what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue philosophers.

Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a sense-impression is a mere needle-p.r.i.c.k, useful only as it starts his thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense.

But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of philosophy to which he objected, as follows:

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and _species_ and _differentia_, into formal cla.s.ses, under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. [Footnote: _Plato and Platonism._]

But it is only against this particular conception of philosophy, which is based upon abstraction of the ideal from the sensual, that the poet demurs. Beside the foregoing view of philosophy expressed by Pater, we may place that of another poet, an adherent, indeed, of one of the most purely sensuous schools of poetry. Arthur Symons states as his belief, "The poet who is not also philosopher is like a flower without a root.

Both seek the same infinitude; the one apprehending the idea, the other the image." [Footnote: _The Romantic Movement,_ p. 129.] That is, to the poet, ideality is the hidden life of the sensual.

Wherever a dry as dust rationalizing theology is in vogue, it is true that some poets, in their reaction, have gone to the extreme of subscribing to a materialistic conception of the universe. Sh.e.l.ley is the cla.s.sic example. Everyone is aware of his revulsion from Paley's theology, which his father sternly proposed to read aloud to him, and of his noisy championing of the materialistic cause, in _Queen Mab_.

But Sh.e.l.ley is also the best example that might be cited to prove the incompatibility of materialism and poetry. It might almost be said that Sh.e.l.ley never wrote a line of genuine poetry while his mind was under the bondage of materialistic theory. Fortunately Sh.e.l.ley was scarcely able to hold to the delusion that he was a materialist throughout the course of an entire poem, even in his extreme youth. To Sh.e.l.ley, more truly perhaps than to any other poet, the physical world throbs with spiritual life. His materialistic theories, if more loudly vociferated, were of scarcely greater significance than were those of Coleridge, who declared, "After I had read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary,_ I sported infidel, but my infidel vanity never touched my heart."

[Footnote: James Gillman, _Life of Coleridge_, p. 23.]

A more serious charge of atheism could be brought against the poets at the other end of the century. John Davidson was a thoroughgoing materialist, and the other members of the school, made sceptic by their admiration for the sophistic philosophy of Wilde, followed Davidson in his views. But this hardly strengthens the philosopher's charge that materialistic philosophy characterizes poets as a cla.s.s, for the curiously limited poetry which the 1890 group produced might lead the reader to a.s.sume that spiritual faith is indispensable to poets. If idealistic philosophy, as Arthur Symons a.s.serts, is the root of which poetry is the flower, then the artificial and exotic poetry of the _fin de siecle_ school bears close resemblance to cut flowers, already drooping.

It is significant that the outstanding materialist among American poets, Poe, produced poetry of much the same artificial temper as did these men. Poe himself was unable to accept, with any degree of complacence, the materialistic philosophy which seemed to him the most plausible explanation of life. One of his best-known sonnets is a threnody for poetry which, he feels, is pa.s.sing away from earth as materialistic views become generally accepted. [Footnote: See the sonnet, _To Science._] Sensuous as was his conception of poetry, he yet felt that one kills it in taking the spirit of ideality out of the physical world.

"I really perceive," he wrote in this connection, "that vanity about which most men merely prate,--the vanity of the human or temporal life."

[Footnote: Letter to James Russell Lowell, July 2, 1844.]

It is obvious that atheism, being pure negation, is not congenial to the poetical temper. The general rule holds that atheism can exist only where the reason holds the imagination in bondage. It was not merely the horrified recoil of orthodox opinion that prevented Constance Naden, the most voluminous writer of atheistic verse in the last century, from obtaining lasting recognition as a poet. Verse like hers, which expresses mere denial, is not essentially more poetical than blank paper.