I saw thy pulses' maddening play,
Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way,
And yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven.
And in A Bard's Epitaph he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time.
Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, Villon; Swinburne, Burns, A Ballad of François Villon.] At the same time Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, Verlaine; Swinburne, Ave atque Vale.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded
What expiating agony
May for him damned to poesy
Shut in that little sentence be,—
What deep austerities of strife,—
He lived his life. He lived his life.
[Footnote: A Judgment in Heaven.]
Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their charge against the poet,—namely, that he is more susceptible to temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. [Footnote: The Man of Genius.] Nordau points out that the disease is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand temptation.
Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each expression of his theories.
In the van of the recoil against Byronic morals one finds Crabbe, [Footnote: See Edmund Shore, Villars.] Praed [Footnote: See The Talented Man, To Helen with Crabbe's Poetry.] and Landor. [Footnote: See Few Poets Beckon, Apology for Gebir.] Later, when the wave of Byronic influence had time to reach America, Longfellow took up the cudgels against the evil poet. [Footnote: See his treatment of Aretino, in Michael Angelo.] Protest against the group of decadents who flourished in the 1890's even yet rocks the poetic waves slightly, though these men did not succeed in making the world take them as seriously as it did Byron. The cue of most present-day writers is to dismiss the professedly wicked poet lightly, as an aspirant to the laurel who is unworthy of serious consideration. A contemporary poet reflects of such would-be riders of Pegasus:
There will be fools that in the name of art
Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall,
I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard
From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves
Far, far above them.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, At the Sign of the Golden Shoe. See also
Richard Le Gallienne, The Decadent to his Soul, Proem to the
Reader in English Poems; Joyce Kilmer, A Ballad of New Sins.]
Poets who indignantly repudiate any and all charges against their moral natures have not been unanimous in following the same line of defense. In many cases their argument is empirical, and their procedure is ideally simple. If a verse-writer of the present time is convicted of wrong living, his title of poet is automatically taken away from him; if a singer of the past is secure in his laurels, it is understood that all scandals regarding him are merely malicious fictions. In the eighteenth century this mode of passing judgment was most naïvely manifest in verse. Vile versifiers were invariably accused of having vile personal lives, whereas the poet who basked in the light of fame was conceded, without investigation, to "exult in virtue's pure ethereal flame." In the nineteenth century, when literary criticism was given over to prose-writers, those ostensible friends of the poets held by the same simple formula, as witness the attempts to kill literary and moral reputation at one blow, which were made, at various times, by Lockhart, Christopher North and Robert Buchanan. [Footnote: Note their respective attacks on Keats, Swinburne and Rossetti.]
It may indicate a certain weakness in this hard and fast rule that considerable difficulty is encountered in working it backward. The highest virtue does not always entail a supreme poetic gift, though poets and their friends have sometimes implied as much. Southey, in his critical writings, is likely to confuse his own virtue and that of his protégé, Kirke White, with poetical excellence. Longfellow's, Whittier's, Bryant's strength of character has frequently been represented by patriotic American critics as guaranteeing the quality of their poetical wares.