The Poet's Poet Part 8

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, a.s.signing 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 s.e.x 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 ill.u.s.trated 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, Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley, it becomes evident that tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Sh.e.l.ley was convinced that he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that Sh.e.l.ley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J.

Hogg, _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_ Sh.e.l.ley 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.

Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 pa.s.sing; 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 pa.s.sionate love and scorn, The lips that sang of Heaven and of h.e.l.l, 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 superst.i.tious believed that he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another,

Behold him, how h.e.l.l'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 h.e.l.l.

[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._]

In this connection one thinks at once of Sh.e.l.ley'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 l.u.s.tre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone.

The likeness of Sordello to Sh.e.l.ley [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 s.e.x. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 chast.i.ty of their style. John Hughes [Footnote: See _To the Author of "A Fatal Friends.h.i.+p."_] 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.]