The same defense is made by Richard W. Gilder in lines entitled Our Elder Poets.] In differing mode, Swinburne's poetry is perhaps an expression of the same attitude. The ultra-erotic verse of that poet somehow suggests a wild hullabaloo raised to divert our attention from the fact that he was constitutionally incapable of experiencing passion.
Early in the century, something approaching the Wordsworthian doctrine of emotion recollected in tranquillity was in vogue, as regards capacity for passion. The Byronic hero is one whose affections have burned themselves out, and who employs the last worthless years of his life writing them up. Childe Harold is
Grown aged in this world of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him, nor below
Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance.
The very imitative hero of Praed's The Troubadour, after disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six dismisses passion forever. We are assured that
The joys that wound, the pains that bless,
Were all, were all departed,
And he was wise and passionless
And happy and cold-hearted.
The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely, beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he had not wantonly wasted his emotions.
One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are portrayed in Alexander Smith's Life Drama, where the hero agonizes for relief from his too ardent love:
O that my heart was quiet as a grave Asleep in moonlight! For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul A passion burns from basement to the cope. Poesy, poesy! But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher described in the Phaedo. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness, is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse. One of our minor American poets declares,
The bard who yields to flesh his emotion
Knows naught of the frenzy divine.
[Footnote: Passion, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest
against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of Endymion.]
But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a Platonist—and "all poets are more or less Platonists" [Footnote: H. B. Alexander, Poetry and the Individual, p. 46.]—the poet is led upward to the love of ideal beauty through its incarnations in the world of sense. Thus in one of the most Platonic of our poems, G. E. Woodberry's Agathon, Eros says of the hero, who is the young poet of the Symposium,