Chapter I: The Egocentric Circle (2)

How shall we know him?
Ye shall know him not,
Till, ended hate and scorn,
To the grave he's borne.
[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._]

Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring

Of these states the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric,
fail of their full returns.
[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._]

As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G. Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._]

To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, _More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, _Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); S. J. Cassells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous designs of the public.

A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are described:

Where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet.

The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter waters,

And toads seen crawling on his hand,
And clinging bats, but dimly scanned,
Full in his face their wings expand.
A paleness took the poet's cheek;
"Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek
The lady's will with utterance meek:
"Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"
(And this time she spoke cheerfully)
Behooves thee know world's cruelty.

The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides. [Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." [Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and Tasso [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Tasso_; Shelley, _Song for Tasso_; James Thomson, B. V., _Tasso to Leonora_.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.]

Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all geniuses:

Alas! what snows are shed
Upon thy laurelled head,
Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!
Malignity lets none
Approach the Delphic throne;
A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's
hundred tongues.
[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.]

The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse.

Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, [Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and _Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ (1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by him. Thus Shelley exults in the thought,

The Pythian of the age one arrow drew
And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low.
[Footnote: _Adonais._]

The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his critics is dying out, though Shelley's _Adonais_ will go far toward giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._] brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile self-characterization into his mouth:

I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse
They hounded on to death's untimely doom.
[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).]

In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they worship her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, 1845.]

With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have raised the most indignant storm of protest is Shelley. Several poets, as the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr. Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Shelley almost part of their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Shelley's life warrant such sympathy. Then too, Shelley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for Shelley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_:

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

Accordingly Shelley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Shelley_; Alfred Austin, _Shelley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _The General Public_.]

The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one

Who in another's fate now wept his own.

Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The Visitation of Peace_.]

Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by assuming a pose of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this friendly attitude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Shore._] Emerson tries to get on common ground with his audience by asserting that every man is a poet to some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same assertion as Emerson:

There cannot be confusion of sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.
[Footnote: _Pandeen._]

But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, "Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O. W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B. Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, _James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches.

There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early childhood,

I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of solitude.

Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse:

These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk
Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night.
[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.]

So he describes the poet's character:

He is retired as noontide dew
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.]

In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries. Longfellow caused the poet to boast that he "had no friends, and needed none." [Footnote: _Michael Angelo_.] Emerson expressed the same mood frankly. He takes civil leave of mankind:

Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood,
To fetch his word to men.
[Footnote: _The Apology_.]

He points out the idiosyncrasy of the poet:

Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.
[Footnote: _Saadi_.]

Thus he works up to his climactic statement regarding the amplitude of the poet's personality:

I have no brothers and no peers
And the dearest interferes;
When I would spend a lonely day,
Sun and moon are in my way.
[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

Although the poet's egotism would seem logically to cause him to find his chief pleasure in undisturbed communion with himself, still this picture of the poet delighting in solitude cannot be said to follow, usually, upon his banishment from society. For the most part the poet is characterized by an insatiable yearning for affection, and by the stupidity and hostility of other men he is driven into proud loneliness, even while his heart thirsts for companionship.[Footnote: See John Clare, _The Stranger, The Peasant Poet, I Am_; James Gates Percival, _The Bard_; Joseph Rodman Drake, _Brorix_ (1847); Thomas Buchanan Reade, _My Heritage_; Whittier, _The Tent on the Beach_; Mrs. Frances Gage, _The Song of the Dreamer_ (1867); R. H. Stoddard, _Utopia_; Abram J. Ryan, _Poets_; Richard H. Dana, _The Moss Supplicateth for the Poet_; Frances Anne Kemble, _The Fellowship of Genius_ (1889); F. S. Flint, _Loneliness_(1909); Lawrence Hope, _My Paramour was Loneliness_ (1905); Sara Teasdale, _Alone_.] One of the most popular poet-heroes of the last century, asserting that he is in such an unhappy situation, yet declares:

For me, I'd rather live
With this weak human heart and yearning blood,
Lonely as God, than mate with barren souls.
More brave, more beautiful than myself must be
The man whom I can truly call my friend.
[Footnote: Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_.]

So the poet is limited to the companionship of rare souls, who make up to him for the indifference of all the world beside. Occasionally this compensation is found in romantic love, which flames all the brighter, because the affections that most people expend on many human relationships are by the poet turned upon one object. Apropos of the world's indifference to him, Shelley takes comfort in the assurance of such communion, saying to Mary,

If men must rise and stamp with fury blind
On his pure name who loves them--thou and I,
Sweet friend! can look from our tranquillity
Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,--
Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by,
That burn from year to year with inextinguished light.
[Footnote: Introduction to _The Revolt of Islam_.]

But though passion is so often the source of his inspiration, the poet's love affairs are seldom allowed to flourish. The only alleviation of his loneliness must be, then, in the friendship of unusually gifted and discerning men, usually of his own calling. Doubtless the ideal of most nineteenth century writers would be such a jolly fraternity of poets as Herrick has made immortal by his _Lines to Ben Jonson_.[Footnote: The tradition of the lonely poet was in existence even at this time, however. See Ben Jonson, _Essay on Donne_.] A good deal of nineteenth century verse shows the author enviously dwelling upon the ideal comradeship of Elizabethan poets.[Footnote: Keats' _Lines on the Mermaid Tavern_, Browning's _At the Mermaid_, Watts-Dunton's _Christmas at the Mermaid_, E. A. Robinson's _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_, Josephine Preston Peabody's _Marlowe_, and Alfred Noyes' _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_ all present fondly imagined accounts of the gay intimacy of the master dramatists. Keats, who was so generous in acknowledging his indebtedness to contemporary artists, tells, in his epistles, of the envy he feels for men who created under these ideal conditions of comradeship.] But multiple friendships did not flourish among poets of the last century,--at least they were overhung by no glamor of romance that lured the poet to immortalize them in verse. The closest approximation to such a thing is in the redundant complimentary verse, with which the New England poets showered each other to such an extent as to arouse Lowell's protest. [Footnote: See _A Fable for Critics_.] Even they, however, did not represent themselves as living in Bohemian intimacy. Possibly the temperamental jealousy that the philistine world ascribes to the artist, causing him to feel that he is the one elect soul sent to a benighted age, while his brother-artists are akin to the money-changers in the temple, hinders him from unreserved enjoyment even of his fellows' society. Tennyson's and Swinburne's outbreaks against contemporary writers appear to be based on some such assumption. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _The New Timon and the Poet_; Bulwer Lytton, _The New Timon_; Swinburne, _Essay on Whitman_. For more recent manifestation of the same attitude see John Drinkwater, _To Alice Meynell_ (1911); Shaemas O'Sheel, _The Poets with the Sounding Gong_ (1912); Robert Graves, _The Voice of Beauty Drowned_ (1920).]

Consequently the poet is likely to celebrate one or two deep friendships in an otherwise lonely life. A few instances of such friendships are so notable, that the reader is likely to overlook their rarity. Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines:

Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say,
And cast them into shape some other day;
Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone,
And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.

The intimacy of Shelley and Byron, recorded in _Julian and Maddalo_, was of a less ardent sort. Indeed Byron said of it, "As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited.... I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired him." [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. (Shelley?) undated.] Arnold's _Thyrsis_, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and more recently, George Edward Woodberry's _North Shore Watch_, indicate that even when the poet has been able to find a human soul which understood him, the friendship has been cut short by death. In fact, the premature close of such friendships has usually been the occasion for their celebration in verse, from classic times onward.

Such friendships, like happy love-affairs, are too infrequent and transitory to dissipate the poet's conviction that he is the loneliest of men. "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," might have been written by almost any nineteenth century poet about any other. Shelley, in particular, in spite of his not infrequent attachments, is almost obsessed by melancholy reflection upon his loneliness. In _To a Skylark_, he pictures the poet "hidden in the light of thought." Employing the opposite figure in the _Defense of Poetry_, he says, "The poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer his own solitude." Of the poet in _Alastor_ we are told,

He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude.

Shelley's sense of his personal loneliness is recorded in _Stanzas Written in Dejection_, and also in _Adonais_. In the latter poem he says of himself,

He came the last, neglected and apart,

and describes himself as

companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell.

Victorian poets were not less depressed by reflection upon the poet's lonely life. Arnold strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in _The Buried Life_, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. _Sordello_ is a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in _A Renegade Poet on the Poet:_

He alone of men, though he travel to the pit, picks up no
company by the way; but has a contrivance to avoid scripture,
and find a narrow road to damnation. Indeed, if the majority
of men go to the nether abodes, 'tis the most hopeful argument
I know of his salvation, for 'tis inconceivable that he should
ever do as other men.

One might imagine that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. Francis Thompson, indeed, does feel himself humbled by his spiritual solitude, and characterizes himself,

I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech,
Love their love or mine own love to them teach,
A bastard barred from their inheritance,
* * * * *
In antre of this lowly body set,
Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
[Footnote: _Sister Songs_.]

But the typical poet yearns not downward, but upward, and above him he finds nothing. Therefore reflection upon his loneliness continually draws his attention to the fact that his isolation is an inevitable consequence of his genius,--that he

Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality.
[Footnote: Matthew Arnold, Sonnet, _Shakespeare_.]

The poet usually looks for alleviation of his loneliness after death, when he is gathered to the company of his peers, but to the supreme poet he feels that even this satisfaction is denied. The highest genius must exist absolutely in and for itself, the poet-egoist is led to conclude, for it will "remain at heart unread eternally." [Footnote: Thomas Hardy, _To Shakespeare_.]

Such is the self-perpetuating principle which appears to insure perennial growth of the poet's egoism. The mystery of inspiration breeds introspection; introspection breeds egoism; egoism breeds pride; pride breeds contempt for other men; contempt for other men breeds hostility and persecution; persecution breeds proud isolation. Finally, isolation breeds deeper introspection, and the poet is ready to start on a second revolution of the egocentric circle.