Tis not in
The harmony of things—this hard decree,
This ineradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree
Whose root is earth.
[Footnote: Childe Harold.]
If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, Ode on the Poetical Character; John Hughes, Ode on Divine Poetry.] Among the romantic poets, the Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling.">[ Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet,
O singing heart, think not of aught save song,
Beauty can do no wrong.
[Footnote: Song.]
Again one hears of the singer,
Pure must he be;
Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear
Where others hear not; see where others see
With a dazed vision,
[Footnote: Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy.]
and again,
To write a poem, a man should be as pure
As frost-flowers.
[Footnote: T. L. Harris, Lyrics of the Golden Age.]
Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who
Lived beyond men, and so stood
Admitted to the brotherhood
Of beauty.
[Footnote: Madison Cawein, The Dreamer of Dreams.]
It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all of them look to a single standard to govern them æsthetically and morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises,