I come from nothing, but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
Down through long links of death and birth,
From the past poets of the earth,
My immortality is there.
Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical argument for reminiscence have concurred in Alice Meynell's last statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he attempted to complete Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Chapman tells his brother poets:
I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried
To work his will, the hand that moved my pen
Was mine and yet—not mine. The bodily mask
Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps
With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come,
Oracular glories, visionary gleams,
And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.
[Footnote: At the Sign of the Golden Shoe.]
The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's appeal at the beginning of The Ring and the Book, that his dead wife shall inspire his poetry.
One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,—a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,—what is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good genius—probably Shakespeare—presiding over him. Swinburne was often called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes:
I do but rave, for it is better thus;
Were once thy starry nature given to mine,
In the one life which would encircle us
My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine;
Better to bear the far sublimer pain
Of thought that has not ripened into speech.
To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing
Divinely to the brain;
For thus the poet at the last shall reach
His own soul's voice, nor crave a brother's string.
[Footnote: Ode to Shelly.]
In the theory that the genius of a past poet may be reincarnated, there is, indeed, a danger that keeps it from appealing to all poets. It tallies too well with the charge of imitativeness, if not downright plagiarism, often brought against a new singer. [Footnote: See Margaret Steele Anderson, Other People's Wreaths, and John Drinkwater, My Songs.] If the poet feels that his genius comes from a power outside himself, he yet paradoxically insists that it must be peculiarly his own. Therefore Mrs. Browning, through Aurora Leigh, shrinks from the suspicion that her gift may be a heritage from singers before her. She wistfully inquires:
My own best poets, am I one with you?
. . . When my joy and pain,
My thought and aspiration, like the stops
Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb
Unless melodious, do you play on me,
My pipers, and if, sooth, you did not play,
Would no sound come? Or is the music mine;
As a man's voice or breath is called his own,
Inbreathed by the life-breather?
Are we exaggerating our modern poet's conviction that a spirit not his own is inspiring him? Does he not rather feel self-sufficient as compared with the earlier singers, who expressed such naïve dependence upon the Muse? We have been using the name Muse in this essay merely as a figure of speech, and is this not the poet's usage when he addresses her? The casual reader is inclined to say, yes, that a belief in the Muse is indeed dead. It would be absurd on the face of it, he might say, to expect a belief in this pagan figure to persist after all the rest of the Greek theogony has become a mere literary device to us. This may not be a reliable supposition, since as a matter of fact Milton and Dante impress us as being quite as deeply sincere as Homer, when they call upon the Muse to aid them in their song. But at any rate everyone is conscious that such a belief has degenerated before the eighteenth century. The complacent turner of couplets felt no genuine need for any Muse but his own keen intelligence; accordingly, though the machinery of invocation persists in his poetry, it is as purely an introductory flourish as is the ornamented initial letter of a poem. Indeed, as the century progresses, not even the pose of serious prayer is always kept up. John Hughes is perhaps the most persistent and sober intreater of the Muse whom we find during this period, yet when he compliments the Muse upon her appearance "at Lucinda's tea-table," [Footnote: See On Lucinda's Tea-table.] one feels that all awe of her has vanished. It is no wonder that James Thomson, writing verses On the Death of His Mother, should disclaim the artificial aid of the muses, saying that his own deep feeling was enough to inspire him. As the romantic movement progressed, it would be easy to show that distaste for the eighteenth century mannerism resulted in more and more flippant treatment of the goddesses. Beattie refers to a contemporary's "reptile Muse, swollen from the sty." [Footnote: See On a Report of a Monument to a Late Author.] Burns alludes to his own Muse as a "tapitless ramfeezled hizzie," [Footnote: See the Epistle to Lapraik.] and sets the fashion for succeeding writers, who so multiply the original nine that each poet has an individual muse, a sorry sort of guardian-angel, whom he is fond of berating for her lack of ability. One never finds a writer nowadays, with courage to refer to his muse otherwise than apologetically. The usual tone is that of Andrew Lang, when he confesses, apropos of the departure of his poetic gift:
'Twas not much at any time
She could hitch into a rhyme,
Never was the muse sublime
Who has fled.
[Footnote: A Poet's Apology.]