Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of sin. [Footnote: The Silent Voices.]
Such is the poet's case for himself. But no matter how eloquently he presents his case, his quarrel with his three enemies remains almost as bitter as before, and he is obliged to pay some attention to their individual charges.
The poet's quarrel with the philistine, in particular, is far from settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary folk are. If the poet professes to be able to achieve righteousness without effort, the only way to prove it is to conform his conduct to that of men who achieve righteousness with groaning of spirit. It is too easy for the poet to justify any and every aberration with the announcement, "My sixth sense for virtue, which you do not possess, has revealed to me the propriety of such conduct." Thus reasons the philistine.
The beauty-blind philistine doubtless has some cause for bewilderment, but the poet takes no pains to placate him. The more genuine is one's impulse toward goodness, the more inevitably, the poet says, will it bring one into conflict with an artificial code of morals. Shelley indicated this at length in The Defense of Poetry, and in both Rosalind and Helen and The Revolt of Islam he showed his bards offending the world by their original conceptions of purity. Likewise of the poet-hero in Prince Athanase Shelley tells us,
Fearless he was, and scorning all disguise.
What he dared do or think, though men might start
He spoke with mild, yet unaverted eyes.
It must be admitted that sometimes, notably in Victorian narrative verse, the fictitious poet's virtue is inclined to lapse into a typically bourgeois respectability. In Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh, for instance, the heroine's morality becomes somewhat rigid, and when she rebukes the unmarried Marian for bearing a child, and chides Romney for speaking tenderly to her after his supposed marriage with Lady Waldemar, the reader is apt to sense in her a most unpoetical resemblance to Mrs. Grundy. And if Mrs. Browning's poet is almost too respectable, she is still not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the utterly innocuous poet set forth by another Victorian, Coventry Patmore. In Patmore's poem, Olympus, the bard decides to spend an evening with his own sex, but he is offended by the cigar smoke and the coarse jests, and flees home to
The milk-soup men call domestic bliss.
Likewise, in The Angel in the House, the poet follows a most domestic line of orderly living. Only once, in the long poem, does he fall below the standard of conduct he sets for himself. This sin consists of pressing his sweetheart's hand in the dance, and after shamefacedly confessing it, he adds,
And ere I slept, on bended knee
I owned myself, with many a tear
Unseasonable, disorderly.
But so distasteful, to the average poet, is such cringing subservience to philistine standards, that he takes delight in swinging to the other extreme, and representing the innocent poet's persecutions at the hands of an unfriendly world. He insists that in venturing away from conventional standards poets merit every consideration, being