And like an unruly child the public struggled against the dose.
Whereupon the poet was likely to lose his temper, and declare, as
Browning did,
My Thirty-four Port, no need to waste
On a tongue that's fur, and a palate—paste!
A magnum for friends who are sound: the sick—
I'll posset and cosset them, nothing loath,
Henceforward with nettle-broth.
[Footnote: Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto Volume.]
Yes, much as we pity the forlorn poet when his sensitive feelings are hurt by the world's cruelty, we must still pronounce that he is partly to blame. If the public is buzzing around his head like a swarm of angry hornets, he must in most cases admit that he has stirred them up with a stick.
The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating. They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public more deliberately expressed.
At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the Castle of Indolence, Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also To Mr. Thomson, Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem, by H. Hill.] and Thomas Hood [Footnote: See To the Late Lord Mayor.] both concerned themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the Ode Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle.] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son. [Footnote: The Patron.] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for the poet, in Lady Geraldine's Courtship, and upheld the nobility of the untitled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst snob in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See Common Sense and Genius, and Rhymes by the Road.] Later libelers have been, usually, writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, The Green Carnation, which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets. [Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience made an even greater sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim,
I say an artist
Who does not wholly give himself to art,
Who has about him nothing marked or strange,
But tries to suit himself to all the world
Will ne'er attain to greatness.
[Footnote: Michael Angelo.]
Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss him. He repeats the world's query:
How shall we know him?
Ye shall know him not,
Till, ended hate and scorn,
To the grave he's borne.
[Footnote: When the True Poet Comes.]
Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original attitude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring
Of these states the poet is the equable man,
Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric,
fail of their full returns.
[Footnote: By Blue Ontario's Shore.]