One may lay it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, "I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have recoiled from his words. His declaration was, of course, not equivalent to saying, "I have endeavored to feel what the world thinks I ought to feel," but even so, one suspects that the philosophical part of Coleridge was uppermost at the time of this utterance, and that his obligatory feelings did not flower in a Christabel or a Kubla Khan.
The real parting of the ways between the major and minor contingents of poets comes when certain writers maintain, not merely their freedom from conventional moral standards, but a perverse inclination to seek what even they regard as evil. This is, presumably, a logical, if unconscious, outgrowth of the romantic conception of art as "strangeness added to beauty." For the decadents conceive that the loveliness of virtue is an age-worn theme which has grown so obvious as to lose its æsthetic appeal, whereas the manifold variety of vice contains unexplored possibilities of fresh, exotic beauty. Hence there has been on their part an ardent pursuit of hitherto undreamed-of sins, whose aura of suggestiveness has not been rubbed off by previous artistic expression.
The decadent's excuse for his vices is that his office is to reflect life, and that indulgence of the senses quickens his apprehension of it. He is apt to represent the artist as "a martyr for all mundane moods to tear," [Footnote: See John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse.] and to indicate that he is unable to see life steadily and see it whole until he has experienced the whole gamut of crime.[Footnote: See Oscar Wilde, Ravenna; John Davidson, A Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet, A Ballad of an Artist's Wife; Arthur Symons, There's No Lust Like to Poetry.] Such a view has not, of course, been confined to the nineteenth century. A characteristic renaissance attitude toward life and art was caught by Browning in a passage of Sordello. The hero, in a momentary reaction from idealism, longs for the keener sensations arising from vice and exclaims,
Leave untried
Virtue, the creaming honey-wine; quick squeeze
Vice, like a biting serpent, from the lees
Of life! Together let wrath, hatred, lust,
All tyrannies in every shape be thrust
Upon this now.
Naturally Browning does not allow this thirst for evil to be more than a passing impulse in Sordello's life.
The weakness of this recipe for poetic achievement stands revealed in the cynicism with which expositions of the frankly immoral poet end. If the quest of wickedness is a powerful stimulus to the emotions, it is a very short-lived one. The blasé note is so dominant in Byron's autobiographical poetry,—the lyrics, Childe Harold and Don Juan—as to render quotation tiresome. It sounds no less inevitably in the decadent verse at the other end of the century. Ernest Dowson's Villanelle of the Poet's Road is a typical expression of the mood. Dowson's biography leaves no doubt of the sincerity of his lines,
Wine and women and song, Three things garnish our way: Yet is day overlong. Three things render us strong, Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. Yet is day overlong. Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the Juvenalia of Tennyson [Footnote: See Poems of Two Brothers.]and Clough, [Footnote: See An Evening Walk in Spring.] wherein these youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?—Poor, cowardly, miscreated creatures abound—if you could throw genius into their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.]
Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the Epistle to Lapraik, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, as in the lines,
There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,
I like the lassies—Gude forgie me.
But in The Vision he accounts for his failings as arising from his artist's temperament. The muse tells him,