As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the poet,—that of making charges against his truthfulness,—the poet resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in The Bard, lays the wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, Gladys and her Island; Helen Hunt Jackson, The Singer's Hills; J. G. Holland, Jacob Hurd's Child.]
To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, More Poets Yet.] As for the professional critic, he becomes an ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: Burns, The Poet's Progress; Keats, Epistle to George Felton Matthew; Tennyson, To —— After Reading a Life and Letters; Longfellow, The Poets; Thomas Buchanan Read, The Master Poets; Paul Hamilton Hayne, Though Dowered with Instincts; Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy; George Meredith, Bellerophon; S. L. Fairfield, The Last Song (1832); S. J. Cassells, A Poet's Reflections (1851); Richard Gilder, The New Poet; Richard Realf, Advice Gratis (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, An Outworn Sappho; Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Poet; Theodore Watts-Dunton, The Octopus of the Golden Isles; Francis Ledwidge, The Coming Poet.] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in The Woodman and the Nightingale expresses through an allegory the murderous designs of the public.
A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called The Seraph and the Poet. In A Vision of Poets she betrays less indignation, apparently believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are described:
Where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet.
The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter waters,
And toads seen crawling on his hand,
And clinging bats, but dimly scanned,
Full in his face their wings expand.
A paleness took the poet's cheek;
"Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek
The lady's will with utterance meek:
"Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"
(And this time she spoke cheerfully)
Behooves thee know world's cruelty.
The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society. From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, Poems of Personality (1909); Cale Young Rice, Aeschylus.] and Euripides. [Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, Euripides; Browning, Balaustion's Adventure; Richard Burton, The First Prize.] From Latin writers our poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved." [Footnote: Adonais. See also Robert Bridges, Nero.] Of the great renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously represents even him as suffering triple punishment,—flogging, imprisonment and exile,—for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See Wm. Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, Dante; Sarah King Wiley, Dante and Beatrice; Rossetti, Dante at Verona; Oscar Wilde, Ravenna.] and Tasso [Footnote: Byron, The Lament of Tasso; Shelley, Song for Tasso; James Thomson, B. V., Tasso to Leonora.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's Andre Chenier, and Alfred Lang's Gerard de Nerval come to mind.]
Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that caused his death. [Footnote: See Shelley, Adonais; Coleridge, Monody on the Death of Chatterton; Keats, Sonnet on Chatterton; James Montgomery, Stanzas on Chatterton; Rossetti, Sonnet to Chatterton; Edward Dowden, Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's Chatterton; W. A. Percy, To Chatterton.] Southey is singled out by Landor for especial commiseration; Who Smites the Wounded is an indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all geniuses:
Alas! what snows are shed
Upon thy laurelled head,
Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!
Malignity lets none
Approach the Delphic throne;
A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's
hundred tongues.
[Footnote: To Southey, 1833.]
The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse.