There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege.
So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, Tensone.] it is easy to dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E. Gosse, Life of Swinburne, p. 162.] What is one to say of a period wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted morality, towers above most of his contemporaries?
Whatever its justification, the excuse for the poets flaunting an addiction to immorality lies in the obnoxiousness of the philistine element among their enemies. When mass feeling, mass-morality, becomes too oppressive, poets are wont to escape from its trammelling conventions at any cost. Rather than consent to lay their emotions under the rubber-stamp of expediency, they are likely to aver, with the sophists of old, that morality is for slaves, whereas the rulers among men, the poets, recognize no law but natural law.
Swinburne affords an excellent example of this type of reaction. Looking back tolerantly upon his early prayers to the pagan ideal to
Come down and redeem us from virtue,
upon his youthful zest in leaving
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the roses and raptures of vice,
he tried to dissect his motives. "I had," he said, "a touch of Byronic ambition to be thought an eminent and terrible enemy to the decorous life and respectable fashion of the world, and, as in Byron's case, there was mingled with a sincere scorn and horror of hypocrisy a boyish and voluble affectation of audacity and excess." [Footnote: E. Gosse, Life of Swinburne, p. 309.]
So far, so good. There is little cause for disagreement among poets, however respectable or the reverse their own lives may be, in the contention that the first step toward sincerity of artistic expression must be the casting off of external restraints. Even the most conservative of them is not likely to be seriously concerned if, for the time being, he finds among the younger generation a certain exaggeration of the pose of unrestraint. The respectability of Oliver Wendell Holmes did not prevent his complacent musing over Tom Moore:
If on his cheek unholy blood
Burned for one youthful hour,
'Twas but the flushing of the bud
That bloomed a milk-white flower.
[Footnote: After a Lecture on Moore.]