If the poet is unable to find common ground with the plain man on which he can make his morality sympathetically understood, his quarrel with the puritan is foredoomed to unsuccessful issue, for whereas the plain man will wink at a certain type of indulgence, the puritan will be satisfied with nothing but iron restraint on the poet's part, and systematic thwarting of the impulses which are the breath of life to him.
The poet's only hope of winning in his argument with the puritan lies in the possibility that the race of puritans is destined for extinction. Certainly they were much more numerous fifty years ago than now, and consequently more voluble in their denunciation of the poet. At that time they found their most redoubtable antagonists in the Brownings. Robert Browning devoted a poem, With Francis Furini, to exposing the incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in The Poet's Vow, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken determination to retire from the world,
That so my purged, once human heart,
From all the human rent,
May gather strength to pledge and drink
Your wine of wonderment,
While you pardon me all blessingly
The woe mine Adam sent.
In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts.
No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in their recognition of this fact. In Pauline, Browning traces the poet's mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives in Sordello.
One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than Browning—Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," [Footnote: Song of Myself.] and then records his zest in throwing himself into all phases of life.
It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in Pauline,
I had resolved
No age should come on me ere youth was spent,
For I would wear myself out,
Omar Khayyam's
While you live
Drink!—for once dead you never shall return,