Oft shall war end and peace return
And cities rise where cities burn
Ere one man my hill shall climb
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
[Footnote: Saadi.]
Here the philosopher may demur. If the poet were truly an idealist,—if he found for the world conceptions as pure as those of mathematics, which can be applied equally well to any situation, then, indeed, he might regard himself as the author of progress. But it is the poet's failing that he gives men no vision of abstract beauty. He represents his visions in the contemporary dress of his times. Thus he idealizes the past and the present, showing beauty shining through the dullness and error of human history. Is he not, then, the enemy of progress, since he will lead his readers to imagine that things are ideal as they are?
Rather, men will be filled with reverence for the idealized portrait of themselves that the poet has drawn, and the intervention of the reformer will be unnecessary, since they will voluntarily tear off the shackles that disfigure them. The poet, said Shelley, "redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." Emerson said of Wordsworth, "He more than any other man has done justice to the divine in us." Mrs. Browning said (of Carlyle) "He fills the office of a poet—by analyzing humanity back into its elements, to the destruction of the conventions of the hour." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, February 27, 1845.] This is what Matthew Arnold meant by calling poetry "a criticism of life." Poetry is captivating only in proportion as the ideal shines through the sensual; consequently men who are charmed by the beauty incarnate in poetry, are moved to discard all conventions through which beauty does not shine.
Therefore, the poet repeats, he is the true author of reform. Tennyson says of freedom,
No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirled,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.
[Footnote: The Poet.]
This brings us back to our war poets who have so recently died. Did they indeed disparage the Muse whom they deserted? Did they not rather die to fulfill a poet's prophesy of freedom? A poet who did not carry in his heart the courage of his song—what could be more discreditable to poetry than that? The soldier-poets were like a general who rushes into the thick of the fight and dies beside a private. We reverence such a man, but we realize that it was not his death, but his plan for the engagement, that saved the day.
If such is the poet's conception of his service to mankind, what is his reward? The government of society, he returns. Emerson says,
The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the nations must obey.
[Footnote: Fragment on The Poet.]
What is the poet's reward? Immortality. He is confident that if his vision is true he shall join
The choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues.
[Footnote: George Eliot, The Choir Invisible.]