To return to the question of the poet's fickleness, a very ingenious denial of it is found in the argument that, as his poetical love is purely ideal, he can indulge in a natural love that in no way interferes with it. A favorite view of the 1890's is in Ernest Dowson's Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonæ sub Regno Cynaræ:
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion;
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
The poet sometimes regards it as a proof of the supersensual nature of his passion that he is, willing to marry another woman. The hero of May Sinclair's novel, The Divine Fire, who is irresistibly impelled to propose to a girl, even while he trembles at the sacrilege of her touching a book belonging to his soul's mistress, is only a reductio ad absurdum of a rather popular theory. All narratives of this sort can probably be traced back to Dante's autobiography, as given in the Vita Nuova. We have two poetic dramas dealing with Dante's love, by G. L. Raymond, [Footnote: Dante] and by Sara King Wiley. [Footnote: Dante and Beatrice] Both these writers, however, show a tendency to slur over Dante's affection for Gemma. Raymond represents their marriage as the result solely of Dante's compromising her by apparent attention, in order to avoid the appearance of insulting Beatrice with too close regard. Sara King Wiley, on the other hand, stresses the other aspect of Dante's feeling for Gemma, his gratitude for her pity at the time of Beatrice's death. Of course both dramatists are bound by historical considerations to make the outcome of their plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another famous Renaissance lover for the hero of A Night in Avignon, a play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of Petrarch's devotion to her, comes to his home to offer her heart, but, discovering the other woman's presence there, she fails utterly to comprehend the subtle compliment to her involved, and leaves Petrarch in an agony of contrition.
Marlowe, in Josephine Preston Peabody's drama, distributes his admiration more equally between his two loves. One stimulates the dramatist in him, by giving him an insatiable thirst for this world; the other elevates the poet, by lifting his thoughts to eternal beauty. When he is charged with being in love with the Canterbury maiden who is the object of his reverence, the "Little Quietude," as he calls her, he, comparing her to the Evening Star, contrasts her with the object of his burning passion, who seems to him the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He explains,
I serve a lady so imperial fair,
June paled when she was born. Indeed no star,
No dream, no distance, but a very woman,
Wise with the argent wisdom of the snake;
Fair nurtured with that old forbidden fruit
That thou hast heard of …
… I would eat, and have all human joy,
And know,—and know.
He continues,
But, for the Evening Star, I have it there.
I would not have it nearer. Is that love
As thou dost understand? Yet is it mine
As I would have it: to look down on me,
Not loving and not cruel; to be bright,
Out of my reach; to lighten me the dark
When I lift eyes to it, and in the day
To be forgotten. But of all things, far,
Far off beyond me, otherwise no star.
Marlowe's closing words bring us to another important question, i. e., the stage of love at which it is most inspiring. This is the subject of much difference of opinion. Mrs. Browning might well inquire, in one of her love sonnets,
How, Dearest, wilt thou have me for most use?
A hope, to sing by gladly? or a fine
Sad memory with thy songs to interfuse?
A shade, in which to sing, of palm or pine?
A grave, on which to rest from singing? Choose.
[Footnote: Sonnets from the Portuguese, XVII.]
Each of these situations has been celebrated as begetting the poet's
inspiration.
To follow the process of elimination, we may first dispose of the married state as least likely to be spiritually creative. It is true that we find a number of poems addressed by poets to their wives. But these are more likely to be the contented purring of one who writes by a cozy fireside, than the passionate cadence of one whose genius has been fanned to flame. One finds but a single champion of the married state considered abstractly. This is Alfred Austin, in whose poem, The Poet and the Muse, his genius explains to the newly betrothed poet: