But above all, go to practical people, go, jangle their door-bells.
Say that you do no work, and that you will live forever.
[Footnote: Salutation the Second.]
Surely no one else has had so bad a time with efficiency experts as has the poet, even though everyone whose occupation does not bring out sweat on the brow is likely to fall under their displeasure. The scholar, for instance, is given no rest from their querulous complaints, because he has been sitting at his ease, with a book in his hand, while they have dug the potatoes for his dinner. But the poet is the object of even bitterer vituperation. He, they remind him, does not even trouble to maintain a decorous posture during his fits of idleness. Instead, he is often discovered flat on his back in the grass, with one foot swinging aloft, wagging defiance at an industrious world. What right has he to loaf and invite his soul, while the world goes to ruin all about him?
The poet reacts variously to these attacks. Sometimes with (it must be confessed) aggravating meekness, he seconds all that his beraters say of his idle ways. [Footnote: For verse dealing with the idle poet see James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence (Stanzas about Samuel Patterson, Dr. Armstrong, and the author); Barry Cornwall, The Poet and the Fisher, and Epistle to Charles Lamb on His Emancipation from the Clerkship; Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply; Emerson, Apology; Whitman, Song of Myself; Helen Hunt Jackson, The Poet's Forge; P. H. Hayne, An Idle Poet Dreaming; Henry Timrod, They Dub Thee Idler; Washington Allston, Sylphs of the Seasons; C. W. Stoddard, Utopia; Alan Seeger, Oneata; J. G. Neihardt, The Poet's Town.] Sometimes he gives them the plaintive assurance that he is overtaxed with imaginary work. But occasionally he seems to be really stung by their reproaches, and tries to convince them that by following a strenuous avocation he has done his bit for society, and has earned his hours of idleness as a poet.
When the modern poet tries to establish his point by exhibiting singers laboring in the business and professional world, he cannot be said to make out a very good case for himself. He has dressed an occasional fictional bard in a clergyman's coat, in memory, possibly, of Donne and Herbert. [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, A Life in Song, and The Real and the Ideal.] In politics, he has exhibited in his verses only a few scattered figures,—Lucan, [Footnote: See Nero, Robert Bridges.] Petrarch, [Footnote: See Landor, Giovanna of Naples, and Andrea of Hungary.] Dante, [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, Dante.] Boccaccio, Walter Map, [Footnote: See A Becket, Tennyson.] Milton [Footnote: See Milton, Bulwer Lytton; Milton, George Meredith.]—and these, he must admit, belong to remote periods. Does D'Annunzio bring the poet-politician down to the present? But poets have not yet begun to celebrate D'Annunzio in verse. Really there is only one figure, a protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as following many callings, and adorning them all. Or no, not quite all, for a recent verse-writer has gone to the length of representing Shakespeare as a pedagogue, and in this profession the master dramatist is either inept, or three centuries in advance of his time, for the citizens of Stratford do not take kindly to his scholastic innovations. [Footnote: See William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, a drama, Richard Garnett.]
If the poet does not appear a brilliant figure in the business world, he may turn to another field with the confidence that here his race will vindicate him from the world's charges of sluggishness or weakness. He is wont proudly to declare, with Joyce Kilmer,
When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is a woman's
work,
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.
There was Byron, who left all his lady-loves, to fight against the
Turk,
And David, the singing king of the Jews, who was born with a sword
in his hand.
It was yesterday that Rupert Brooke went out to the wars and died,
And Sir Philip Sidney's lyric voice was as sweet as his arm was
strong,
And Sir Walter Raleigh met the axe as a lover meets his bride,
Because he carried in his heart the courage of his song.
[Footnote: Joyce Kilmer, The Proud Poet.]
It was only yesterday, indeed, that Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, Alan Seeger and Joyce Kilmer made the memory of the soldier poet lasting. And it cannot be justly charged that the draft carried the poet, along with the street-loafer, into the fray, an unwilling victim. From Aeschylus and David to Byron and the recent war poets, the singer may find plenty of names to substantiate his claim that he glories in war as his natural element. [Footnote: For poetry dealing with the poet as a warrior see Thomas Moore, The Minstrel Boy, O Blame Not the Bard, The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, Shall the Harp then be Silent, Dear Harp of My Country; Praed, The Eve of Battle; Whitman, Song of the Banner at Daybreak; E. C. Stedman, Jean Prouvaire's Song at the Barricade, Byron; G. L. Raymond, Dante, A Song of Life; S. K. Wiley, Dante and Beatrice; Oscar Wilde, Ravenna; Richard Realf, Vates, Written on the Night of His Suicide; Cale Young Rice, David, Aeschylus; Swinburne, The Sisters; G. E. Woodberry, Requiem; Rupert Brooke, 1914; Joyce Kilmer, In Memory of Rupert Brooke, The Proud Poet; Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendez-vous with Death, Sonnet to Sidney, Liebestod; John Bunker, On Bidding Farewell to a Poet Gone to the Wars; Jessie Rittenhouse, To Poets Who Shall Fall in Battle; Rossiter Johnson, A Soldier Poet; Herbert Kaufman, Hell Gate of Soissons; Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer; Julian Grenfil, Into Battle; Grace Hazard Conkling, Francis Ledwidge; Richard Mansfield, 2d, Song of the Artists; Norreys Jephson O'Connor, In Memoriam: Francis Ledwidge; Donald F. Goold Johnson, Rupert Brooke.] A recent writer has said, "The poet must ever go where the greatest songs are singing," [Footnote: See Christopher Morley, Essay on Joyce Kilmer.] and nowhere is the poetry of life so manifest as where life is in constant hazard. The verse of Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger surely makes it plain that warfare was the spark which touched off their genius, even as it might have done Byron's,
When the true lightning of his soul was bared,
Long smouldering till the Mesolonghi torch.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips, Emily Brontë.]
But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him that the world claims the whole of his time. If, after a day of strenuous activity, he hurries home with the pleasant conviction that he has earned a long evening in which to woo the Muse, the world is too likely to peer through the shutters and exclaim, "What? Not in bed yet? Then come out and do some extra chores." If the poet is to prove his title as an efficient citizen, it is clear that he must reveal some merit in verse-making itself. If he can make no more ambitious claims for himself, he must, at the very least, show that Browning was not at fault when he excused his occupation:
I said, to do little is bad; to do nothing is worse,
And wrote verse.
[Footnote: Ferishtah's Fancies.]