Tall galleons,
Out of their very beauty driven to dare
The uncompassed sea, founder in starless night.
[Footnote: At the Sign of the Golden Shoe, Alfred Noyes.]
He is convinced that the public, far from sympathizing with such courage, deliberately tries to drive the poet to desperation. Josephine Preston Peabody makes Marlowe inveigh against the public,
My sins they learn by rote,
And never miss one; no, no miser of them,
* * * * *
Avid of foulness, so they hound me out
Away from blessing that they prate about,
But never saw, and never dreamed upon,
And know not how to long for with desire.
[Footnote: Marlowe.]
In the same spirit Richard Le Gallienne, in lines On the Morals of
Poets, warns their detractor,
Bigot, one folly of the man you flout
Is more to God than thy lean life is whole.
If it be true that the poet occasionally commits an error, he points out that it is the result of the philistine's corruption, not his own. He acknowledges that it is fatally easy to lead him, not astray perhaps, but into gravely compromising himself, because he is characterized by a childlike inability to comprehend the very existence of sin in the world. Of course his environment has a good deal to do with this. The innocent shepherd poet, shut off from crime by many a grassy hill and purling stream, has a long tradition behind him. The most typical pastoral poet of our period, the hero of Beattie's The Minstrel, suffers a rude shock when an old hermit reveals to him that all the world is not as fair and good as his immediate environment. The innocence of Wordsworth, and of the young Sordello, were fostered by like circumstances. Arnold conceives of Clough in this way, isolating him in Oxford instead of Arcadia, and represents him as dying from the shock of awakening to conditions as they are. But environment alone does not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize evil motives when they are face to face with them.
Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs. Browning, [Footnote: See A Vision of Poets.] Swinburne [Footnote: See A New Year's Ode.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See Sister Songs.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley,
The curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest.
Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of Rosalind and Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion and Prince Athanase, share the disposition of the last-named one:
Naught of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same.