A feeble hand essays
To swell the tide of song,
[Footnote: C. H. Faimer, Invocation.]
and send out their ideas with fond insistence upon their diminutiveness:
Go, little book, and with thy little thoughts,
Win in each heart and memory a home.
[Footnote: C. Augustus Price, Dedication.]
But among writers whose names are recognizable without an appeal to a librarian's index, precisely this attitude is not met with. It would be absurd, of course, to deny that one finds convincingly sincere expressions of modesty among poets of genuine merit. Many of them have taken pains to express themselves in their verse as humbled by the genius above their grasp. [Footnote: See Emerson, In a Dull Uncertain Brain; Whittier, To my Namesake; Sidney Lanier, Ark of the Future; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Last Reader; Bayard Taylor, L'Envoi; Robert Louis Stevenson, To Dr. Hake; Francis Thompson, To My Godchild.] But we must agree with their candid avowals that they belong in the second rank. The greatest poets of the century are not in the habit of belittling themselves. It is almost unparalleled to find so sweeping a revolutionist of poetic traditions as Burns saying of himself:
I am nae poet, in a sense,
But just a rhymer like, by chance,
And hae to learning nae pretense,
Yet what the matter?
Whene'er my muse does on me glance,
I jingle at her.
[Footnote: Epistle to Lapraik.]
Most of the self-depreciatory writers, by their very abnegation of the title, exalt the supreme poet. There are few indeed so unconcerned about the dignity of the calling as is Sir Walter Scott, who assigns to the minstrels of his tales a subordinate social position that would make the average bard depicted in literature gnash his teeth for rage, and who casually disposes of the poet's immortality:
Let but the verse befit a hero's fame;
Immortal be the verse, forgot the author's name.
[Footnote: Introduction to Don Roderick.]
Mrs. Browning, to be sure, also tries to prick the bubble of the poet's conceit, assuring him:
Ye are not great because creation drew
Large revelations round your earliest sense,
Nor bright because God's glory shines for you.
[Footnote: Mountaineer and Poet.]
But in her other poetry, notably in Aurora Leigh and A Vision of Poets, she amply avows her sense of the preëminence of the singer, as well as of his song.